Logical Foundations of Prolog



Logic is a very broad, interesting and also beautiful topic.

Video: Logic


There is no universally accepted definition for what logic actually is. However, what we can say is that logic is concerned—at least among other things—with the properties of, and the relations between: There are different logics, because changing these components yields different frameworks.

Logic and computation are closely related. For example, we can formulate logical statements about computations, and derive logical consequences from them that correspond to results of the computations.

It can be argued that programming is a form of theory building. See for example Programming as Theory Building by Peter Naur.

Prolog is based on classical first-order predicate logic.

Video: Predicate Logic


In fact, the core of Prolog is restricted to a Turing complete subset of first-order predicate logic called Horn clauses.
Video: Horn Clauses


A Prolog program is a sequence of Horn clauses that define what is true, and what follows from what.

Internally, Prolog uses a proof method called resolution. Resolution is based on the idea of proof by contradiction: To prove a logical consequence of a set of axioms, we assume the opposite of what we want to prove, and show that this contradicts the axioms which we take for granted.

Logically, when Prolog answers a query, it tries to find a resolution refutation of the negated query and the set of clauses that constitute a program. When a refutation is found, it means that the query, with the appropriate bindings, is a logical consequence of the program.

For Horn clauses, resolution can be implemented very efficiently.

Resolution leaves a lot of freedom in how the search for contradictions is to be performed. Accordingly, Prolog programs can be interpreted with different evaluation strategies. The default execution strategy is called SLDNF resolution: SLD resolution with negation as finite failure. Another popular execution strategy of Prolog programs is called SLG resolution, also known as tabling. Other variants include iterative deepening and various heuristics.

Regarded as a theorem prover, Prolog with its default execution strategy is incomplete in the sense that, in general, not all logical consequences of a theory are found, because infinite branches of the search tree may occlude them. For example, even though a is a logical consequence of the theory {aa} ∪ {a}, a depth-first traversal of the search space over admissible inferences will not derive this if it gets caught up in the infinite branch trying to derive a from aa by deriving a, then again trying to derive a from aa etc.

Even though Prolog itself is incomplete in general, we can use it to implement complete theorem provers. This is because Prolog is a programming language and can be used to express all known computations. In addition, we can interpret Prolog programs with variants of resolution that are themselves complete.

Since Prolog allows us to decouple the logical description of what holds (i.e., the Horn clauses) from how the search for logical consequences is performed, we can write Algorithm = Logic + Control.


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