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Use Prolog to write psycho-philosophical case studies

8 points by vaguetruth ↗ HN
guys! I'm into logic and philosophy of language applied to psychology. stumbled on this site from googling prolog! please, can you recommend a programming Prolog video intro for me? And subsequent todo (applied) videos I can follow. I'm interested in programming (my undergrad is cs) immediately and applying Prolog to write psycho-philosophical case studies.

7 comments

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TheMatten
You seem to have a very specific use case in mind and I am not really sure whether Prolog is going to be a good fit, but there was recently a discussion about the language: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40994552

Specifically, this online book (mentioned in that discussion) may be a good resource, I've used author's content as a reference several times: https://www.metalevel.at/prolog

vaguetruth
"I am not really sure whether Prolog is going to be a good fit" what is it about Prolog that doesn't sync with my use case that made you write this?

Thanks for the online book recommendation!!

usgroup
Consider starting here: https://book.simply-logical.space/src/simply-logical.html

There isn't much to read; you mostly have to spend your time thinking about implications.

It'll quickly test how into logic you really are :-)

Good luck.

vaguetruth
Thanks for that! :)
usgroup
I'd additionally suggest joining the SWI Prolog board. They are a kind and generous community. Jan Wielemaker -- the principal contributor -- often answers questions directly.

Meanwhile, SWI Prolog is a mature and commercially used open-source Prolog distribution. It has a huge number of libraries which will come in useful for real world applications.

shawa_a_a
I don’t know about your particular use case, but it is never a bad idea to learn Prolog.

https://www.metalevel.at/prolog

The Power of Prolog is an extremely in depth, comprehensive introduction that starts right from fundamentals, and goes into some pretty advanced topics. It’s a really great resource, with well-produced accompanying videos, and leans into properly grokking the language and the “Prolog way” of problem solving.

I’d make a meta point that learning Prolog and forcing yourself to solve problems the “prolog way” serves as a great exercise in understanding the importance of using the right tool for the job, and working with, rather than in spite of , your tools.

Rochus
What do you mean by "psycho-philosophical case studies"? Why do you think that you need Prolog for this? Are you familiar e.g. with CYC and their way of knowledge formalisation/representation? See e.g https://iral.cs.umbc.edu/Pubs/AAAI06SS-SyntaxAndContentOfCyc... (or the full list of publications https://cyc.com/publications/). CYC is interesting because they have been formalizing knowledge for a very long time, and in parallel have also improved their methods and technologies. Prolog is very rudimentary in comparison. Or did you have a look at e.g. the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web with all the related technologies, such as OWL?