2011-07-09

Even logicians cannot understand?

Zack: I don't get it. Leonard: A dolphin might. - The Big Bang Theory, Season 4 Episode 10

by Forrest Sheng Bao http://fsbao.net

From a practical perspective, I would like to admit that the reason logic programming isn't popular (as popular as empirical programming) is because it involves a lot of math on logics whereas not many people are trained on logics.

Today, I came across a paper, Logic Programming with Defaults and Argumentation Theories at http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~kifer/TechReports/LPDA09.pdf It was published in 2009, at ICLP, the top conference on logic programming.

A modern development in logic programming is the introduction of default negation, which brings in nonmonotonicity and can facilitate common-sense reasoning. But this paper says:

"default negation is too low-level a concept to be safely entrusted to a knowledge engineer who is not a trained logician." 

Oops! On top of that, the authors continue: 

" Anecdotal evidence suggests that logicians are also not doing much better when it comes to modeling concrete application domains using default negation as a sole tool."

I guess we need someone or someones to evangelize logical programming to people who may be in need of it, in a made-easy way.

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