[mattmight]

I'm the researcher mentioned in the article. We used Racket in part because before we transitioned into academic medicine, Will Byrd and I were in academic computer science with a focus on programming languages. Will was building up miniKanren to do lots of cool stuff in program synthesis and program analysis. When we jumped over, it felt natural to bring the power of relational reasoning to knowledge graphs over biomedical knowledge, and so mediKanren was born.

[rscho]

Im a big fan of your work, Mr Might! I'm just an MD with a hobby interest in logic programming, but FWIW I think that you guys have really captured how to use current medical information, a thing that the statistical approach still cannot achieve.

Congratulations to you and your team!!

[mattmight]

Thanks for the kind words!

It's definitely a deliberate leap back to the old logical/symbolic era of AI.

Not mentioned in the article is that logic makes it much easier to emit "proofs" that end users like physicians can understand.

[civilized]

Knowing nothing about miniKanren, I'm curious if you feel its essence much better expressed in a LISP than an Algol-like language like Python? And will relational reasoning increasingly require people to return to LISP as an AI language?

Another question - would it be possible to visualize the exact chain of reasoning used by mediKanren to link ketamine to this disease? It would be wonderful to see exactly what the tool brought to the table that human researchers missed.

[rscho]

https://youtu.be/d-Klzumjulo

[mattmight]

miniKanren definitely exploits a lot of the syntactic dexterity of Scheme/Racket/Lisp to do some really cool things -- or at least to express them more succinctly.

Yes, it is always possible, in fact, since logical arguments can always be rendered as proof trees.

[tuxguy]

I am also a big fan of yours Prof Might! I am very passionate about genomics and rare diseases and your contributions (code, writings, setting up the PMI, and all the others too numerous to list them all here) in this oft neglected area have been very motivating and inspiring to me . Wish more software folks were aware of and work on these important problems at the intersection of biology and software

p.s. would love it if you do a reddit AMA