[Somewhat Off Topic] AI Contest

[Roman Suzi]

On 5 Aug 2001, [iso-8859-1] FranГois Pinard wrote:

>[Roman Suzi]
>
>> To be good for AI, language must have logic programming support.
>
>Hello, Roman.
>
>"logic programming"?  Do you merely mean using some logical inference
>engine, or more than that?  Or would a regexp matcher fit the bill?

yes! I just forgot how to call it in English: inference engine.

>> (I wonder if Guido thinks in this direction 'cause this requires adding
>> new keywords ;-)
>
>You say "requires"?  I'm curious about why new keywords would be needed.
>Python would not be expressive enough as it stands?

It was a joke. But maybe new keyword like "solve" could be useful
for things like:

solve y = f(x)

>> the solver engine comparable to Prolog is to be written.
>
>Nobody did this yet?  I thought a lot of little logical inference engines
>existed here and there, I did not paid much attention to these, recently.

Maybe undegrad homeworks?

>Traditionally, LISP is considered good for AI, without having built-in
>goal seekers.  I would not fear using Python for AI projects...

Well, Prolog is easier to formulate problems, IMHO...

>I worked in AI fields for some while, before doing Operation Research, later.
>I was rather surprised to find out that AI and OR were sometimes addressing
>similar problems deep down, yet formulated quite differently.  The OR
>side was much more humble, and often reached better and faster results.
>With a broad enough perspective, FORTRAN is a good AI language! :-)

Most languages are equivalent to Turing machine. Readability matters. One
must like LISP very much to get results from it. While Prolog could be
taught at secondary school! (In our country we have it in some school
informatics courses!)

>P.S. - The second Prolog interpreter was written in FORTRAN.  Maybe the
>first was written in Algol-60.  Or, maybe, am I thinking about SystХmes-Q?
>This is all old.  In any case, both were designed by the same guy: and if
>the later Prolog was much speedier than SystХmes-Q, it lacked their elegance.

We are lucky to live in time Python is not written in Fortran :-|

Sincerely yours, Roman Suzi
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