Read more
Not long ago" Dennis Merritt wrote one of the best books that I know of about implementing expert systems in Prolog, and I was very glad he published it in our series. The only problem is there are still some unfortunate people around who do not know Prolog and are not sufficiently prepared either to read Merritt's book, or to use this extremely productive language, be it for knowledge-based work or even for everyday programming. Possibly this last statement may surprise you if you were under the impression that Prolog was an "artificial intelligence language" with very limited application potential. Please believe this editor's statement that quite the opposite is true: for at least four years, I have been using Prolog for every programming task in which I am given the option of choosing the language. Therefore, I 'am indeed happy that Dennis Merritt has written another good book on my language of choice, and that it meets the high standard he set with his prior book, Building Expert Systems in Prolog. All that remains for me to do is to wish you success and enjoyment when taking off on your Adventure in Prolog.
List of contents
1 Getting Started.- Jumping In.- Logic Programming.- Jargon.- 2 Facts.- Nani Search.- Exercises.- 3 Simple Queries.- How Queries Work.- Exercises.- 4 Compound Queries.- Built-in Predicates.- Exercises.- 5 Rules.- How Rules Work.- Using Rules.- Exercises.- 6 Arithmetic.- Exercises.- 7 Managing Data.- Exercises.- 8 Recursion.- How Recursion Works.- Pragmatics.- Exercises.- 9 Data Structures.- Exercises.- 10 Unification.- Exercises.- 11 Lists.- Using the List Utilities.- Exercises.- 12 Operators.- Exercises.- 13 Cut.- Using the Cut.- Exercises.- 14 Control Structures.- Recursive Control Loop.- Tail Recursion.- Exercises.- 15 Natural Language.- Difference Lists.- Natural Language Front End.- Definite Clause Grammar.- Reading Sentences.- Exercises.- Nani Search.- Family.- Custord.- Birds.- Predicate Index.
