On Tuesday 13 March 2007 01:41, YKY (Yan King Yin) wrote:
> In my approach, "John loves Mary" can be represented as P(loves,john,mary),
> where P is some generic predicate. Each of those terms ("loves", "john"
> and "mary") is defined by lower-level terms. I don't see any problem with
> this approach.
How would you represent that quality of a chipmunk's scampering gait that
causes it to resemble the tumbling of a leaf blowing in the wind, when seen
from the corner of the eye?
> What specific problems did you encounter?
In logic programming in general -- basically that the Prolog execution model
is suboptimal in a number of ways. If you want to use general inference, tho,
there are some remarkable new systems such as Darwin:
http://goedel.cs.uiowa.edu/Darwin/
(Which BTW uses evolution to do theorem-proving).
For general programming in logic -- it sucks at anything numerical and has
rotten real-time properties. I've been programming in Prolog since the 80s
and it's really good for some things and really bad for others.
But the bottom line problem for using FOPC (or whatever) to represent the
world is not that it's computationally incapable of it -- it's Turing
complete, after all -- but that it's seductively easy to write propositions
with symbols that are English words and fool yourself into thinking you've
accomplished representation. A real working logic-based system that did what
it needed to would consist mostly of predicates like
fmult(num(characteristic(Sign1,Bit11,Bit12,...),mantissa(Bitm11,Bitm12,...)),
num(characteristic(Sign2,Bit21,Bit22,...),mantissa(Bitm21,Bitm22,...)),
num(characteristic(Sign3,Bit31,Bit32,...),mantissa(Bitm31,Bitm32,...)))
:- ... .
And it would wind up doing what my scheme would, e.g. projecting the
n-dimensional trajectory of the chipmunk's gait and the leaf's flutter into a
reduced space, doing a Fourier transform on them, and noting that there was a
region in frequency space where the clusters induced by the two phenomena
overlapped.
Josh
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