| >> They, of course, turned out to be a massive bust. What was supposed to be the wave of the future was the Fifth Generation Computer Project [1], initiated in Japan. Its ambition was to create machines that ran Prolog natively, as in, in special-purpose hardware. What turned out to be a "massive bust" was any attempt to use special purpose hardware in the face of rapid increases in both speed and power by general-purpose hardware (ie, x86). The same fate awaited Lisp Machines [2] and similar projects. Prolog and generally logic programming hasn't really gone bust at any point. The point of Prolog was to use first-order logic as a computer programming language. That worked just fine, and works just fine nowadays still, although of course automated theroem proving must always rely on heuristics in order to be practical. As to the issue of efficiency, most Prolog interpreters today are based on the Warren Abstract Machine, an efficient virtual machine for Prologs. There are other designs besides it that are also equally efficient. Prolog has not really ever had an issue with efficiency ever since the early seventies. In fact it was a previous attempt at a "pure" logic programming language that had the efficiency issues, PLANNER [3]. Prolog was created specifically to be an efficient logic programming language, sacrificing purity for pragamatism. I calculate it will be at least 2070 before we hear the last of it, of course. _______ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_generation_computer [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planner_(programming_language) |