Multi-core and highly-connected architectures have become ubiquitous, and this has brought renewed interest in language-based approaches to the exploitation of parallelism. Since its inception, logic programming has been recognized as a programming paradigm with great potential for automated exploitation of parallelism. The comprehensive survey of the first twenty years of research in parallel logic programming, published in 2001, has served since as a fundamental reference to researchers and developers. The contents are quite valid today, but at the same time the field has continued evolving at a fast pace in the years that have followed. Many of these achievements and ongoing research have been driven by the rapid pace of technological innovation, that has led to advances such as very large clusters, the wide diffusion of multi-core processors, the game-changing role of general-purpose graphic processing units, and the ubiquitous adoption of cloud computing. This has been paralleled by significant advances within logic programming, such as tabling, more powerful static analysis and verification, the rapid growth of Answer Set Programming, and in general, more mature implementations and systems. This survey provides a review of the research in parallel logic programming covering the period since 2001, thus providing a natural continuation of the previous survey. The goal of the survey is to serve not only as a reference for researchers and developers of logic programming systems, but also as engaging reading for anyone interested in logic and as a useful source for researchers in parallel systems outside logic programming. 
Under consideration in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP).

Parallel Logic Programming: A Sequel.

Abstract Multi-core and highly connected architectures have become ubiquitous, and this has brought renewed interest in language-based approaches to the exploitation of parallelism. Since its inception, logic programming has been recognized as a programming paradigm with great potential for automated exploitation of parallelism. The comprehensive survey of the first twenty years of research in parallel logic programming, published in 2001, has served since as a fundamental reference to researchers and developers. The contents are quite valid today, but at the same time the field has continued evolving at a fast pace in the years that have followed. Many of these achievements and ongoing research have been driven by the rapid pace of technological innovation, that has led to advances such as very large clusters, the wide diffusion of multi-core processors, the game-changing role of general-purpose graphic processing units, and the ubiquitous adoption of cloud computing. This has been paralleled by significant advances within logic programming, such as tabling, more powerful static analysis and verification, the rapid growth of Answer Set Programming, and in general, more mature implementations and systems. This survey provides a review of the research in parallel logic programming covering the period since 2001, thus providing a natural continuation of the previous survey. In order to keep the survey self-contained, it restricts its attention to parallelization of the major logic programming languages (Prolog, Datalog, Answer Set Programming) and with an emphasis on automated parallelization and preservation of the sequential observable semantics of such languages. The goal of the survey is to serve not only as a reference for researchers and developers of logic programming systems but also as engaging reading for anyone interested in logic and as a useful source for researchers in parallel systems outside logic programming. 

/pdf/parallel-logic-programming-a-sequel-3mho74yo.pdf

Parallel Logic Programming: A Sequel

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown human-like reasoning abilities but still struggle with complex logical problems. This paper introduces a novel framework, Logic-LM, which integrates LLMs with symbolic reasoning to improve logical problem-solving. Our method first utilizes LLMs to translate a natural language problem into a symbolic formulation. Afterward, a deterministic symbolic solver performs inference on the formulated problem. We also introduce a self-refinement stage, which utilizes the symbolic solver's error messages to revise symbolic formalizations. We demonstrate Logic-LM's effectiveness on four logical reasoning datasets: ProofWriter, PrOntoQA, FOLIO, and LogicalDeduction. Our results show significant improvement compared to LLMs alone, with an average performance boost of 62.6% over standard prompting and 23.5% over chain-of-thought prompting. Our findings suggest that Logic-LM, by combining LLMs with symbolic logic, offers a promising avenue for faithful logical reasoning. Code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/teacherpeterpan/Logic-LLM.

Logic-LM: Empowering Large Language Models with Symbolic Solvers for Faithful Logical Reasoning

We argue that various extensions proposed for Prolog—tabling, constraints, parallelism, coroutining, etc.—must be integrated seamlessly in a single system. We also discuss how goal-directed predicate answer set programming can be incorporated in Prolog, and how it facilitates development of advanced applications in AI and automated commonsense reasoning. 

Prolog: Past, Present, and Future

Logic rules are powerful for expressing complex reasoning and analysis problems. At the same time, they are inconvenient or impossible to use for many other aspects of applications. Integrating rules in a language with sets and functions, and furthermore with updates to objects, has been a subject of significant study. What’s lacking is a language that integrates all constructs seamlessly. This paper presents a language, Alda, that supports all of rules, sets, functions, updates, and objects as seamlessly integrated built-ins, including concurrent and distributed processes. The key idea is to support predicates as set-valued variables that can be used and updated in any scope, and support queries and inference with both explicit and automatic calls to an inference function. We develop a complete formal semantics for Alda. We design a compilation framework that ensures the declarative semantics of rules, while also being able to exploit available optimizations. We describe a prototype implementation that builds on a powerful extension of Python and employs an efficient logic rule engine. We develop a range of benchmarks and present results of experiments to demonstrate Alda’s power for programming and generally good performance.

Programming with rules and everything else, seamlessly


 Both logic programming in general and Prolog in particular have a long and fascinating history, intermingled with that of many disciplines they inherited from or catalyzed. A large body of research has been gathered over the last 50 years, supported by many Prolog implementations. Many implementations are still actively developed, while new ones keep appearing. Often, the features added by different systems were motivated by the interdisciplinary needs of programmers and implementors, yielding systems that, while sharing the “classic” core language, in particular, the main aspects of the ISO-Prolog standard, also depart from each other in other aspects. This obviously poses challenges for code portability. The field has also inspired many related, but quite different languages that have created their own communities. This article aims at integrating and applying the main lessons learned in the process of evolution of Prolog. It is structured into three major parts. First, we overview the evolution of Prolog systems and the community approximately up to the ISO standard, considering both the main historic developments and the motivations behind several Prolog implementations, as well as other logic programming languages influenced by Prolog. Then, we discuss the Prolog implementations that are most active after the appearance of the standard: their visions, goals, commonalities, and incompatibilities. Finally, we perform a SWOT analysis in order to better identify the potential of Prolog and propose future directions along with which Prolog might continue to add useful features, interfaces, libraries, and tools, while at the same time improving compatibility between implementations.

/pdf/fifty-years-of-prolog-and-beyond-135hc60f.pdf

Fifty Years of Prolog and Beyond

Both logic programming in general, and Prolog in particular, have a long and fascinating history, intermingled with that of many disciplines they inherited from or catalyzed. A large body of research has been gathered over the last 50 years, supported by many Prolog implementations. Many implementations are still actively developed, while new ones keep appearing. Often, the features added by different systems were motivated by the interdisciplinary needs of programmers and implementors, yielding systems that, while sharing the “classic” core language, and, in particular, the main aspects of the ISO-Prolog standard, also depart from each other in other aspects. This obviously poses challenges for code portability. The field has also inspired many related, but quite different languages that have created their own communities. This article aims at integrating and applying the main lessons learned in the process of evolution of Prolog. It is structured into three major parts. Firstly, we overview the evolution of Prolog systems and the community approximately up to the ISO standard, considering both the main historic developments and the motivations behind several Prolog implementations, as well as other logic programming languages influenced by Prolog. Then, we discuss the Prolog implementations that are most active after the appearance of the standard: their visions, goals, commonalities, and incompatibilities. Finally, we perform a SWOT analysis in order to better identify the potential of Prolog, and propose future directions along which Prolog might continue to add useful features, interfaces, libraries, and tools, while at the same time improving compatibility between implementations.

Philipp Korner

Papers

Fifty Years of Prolog and Beyond

50 Years of Prolog and Beyond