Please forgive me if this is a misguided missive. I am trying to understand how
to use a rule based system, and as such I am sure I am operating under many
misunderstandings and misconceptions. I am trying to clear them up, and I would
appreciate any corrections to my thoughts below.
I have played around a bit with Prolog. As a basic example, I understand if I
have these facts and rules:
human(Socrates)
mortal(X) :- human(X)
Then, I can ask the Prolog engine is Socrates mortal by stating
"mortal(Socrates)" at the engine prompt, and it will respond with "yes". I can
also ask it for all the known mortals with the statement "mortal(X)", and it
will respond with "Socrates".
I was then thinking how I would do this using Jess. I believe I would use the
deffact of
(deffact myfacts (human Socrates))
and the defrule of
(defrule universal-truth ((human ?x) => (assert (mortal ?x))))
To find all the mortals, I can define a defquery
(defquery all-mortals (mortals ?x))
(Sorry, the syntax may be a bit off. I'm not too worried about that. I don't
necessarily need responses correcting that. That's easy to fix and understand.
It's the concepts that I'm trying to address.)
Then, do a (reset) and a (run).
Then execute the defquery with the statement
(bind ?e (run-query all-mortal))
and use an iteration of ?e to get all the results. (The Jess Language manual
has an example.)
I believe this is the only way to get a similiar functionality to the Prolog
query "mortal(X)".
If that is true, what troubles me about it is the defrule. It basically adds
new facts to the set of facts. What this means to me is if I have a set of 100
"human" facts, after I do the (reset), I now have an additional 100 "mortal"
facts, doubling the number of facts. And if I have some other rule about
humans, it would also add another 100 facts.
This may be considered a feature (because when the new facts are asserted, it
may cause other rules to fire), or it may be just a result of the
implementation. But, also, In some ways (from one particular angle of view),
these asserted facts can be considered "pollution"
1. They take up space.
2. They take up time to generate.
3. If I remove a human fact, the corresponding mortal fact remains. I have to
specifically perform extra steps to get rid of it.
In the Prolog implementation, issues 3 is not an issue. There can be a minor
argument about whether Prolog has issues 1 and 2, but definitely, Prolog will
not multiply the number of facts by the number of rules like Jess does.
So is there a way to express relationships between facts (ie if X is human, then
X is also mortal) without having the relationship specifically stated as a fact
for each candidate of the relationship (ie "(human Socrates)", "(mortal
Socrates)", "(human Chuck)", "(mortal Chuck)", etc.)?
Chuck Sterbis
Senior Programmer/Analyst
Denniston & Denniston, Inc.
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