Prolog is one of the programming languages treated in 198:314. Because of this, people who take AI have generally heard a few lectures on Prolog and written a Prolog program or two. For many people, that's just enough to develop a mix of trepidation and distaste for the weird little language. That trepidation and distaste might extend to the AI class as a whole, if they foresaw a dizzying semester of hacking out big code in Prolog. Don't worry! That's not the plan.
The first four weeks of AI are devoted to the idea of programming with logic that inspires Prolog. By the end of this time, you should be a lot more comfortable about the idea of using clauses, special logical formulas, to create rules that can be executed as a program. You will also be a lot more comfortable with the kinds of operations, like search and unification, that go into executing programs this way. In fact, Prolog (and the other similar interpreters for executing logic programs that we will also study) may actually start to seem like a pretty good idea.
Anyway, class projects need not involve hacking out big code in Prolog; in fact, they probably won't. A very small collection of logical rules can enable complicated and diverse problems to be solved. That's why logic is an attractive base for problem solving! But a small collection of rules can also expose some of the trickiest problems in AI, from managing search to acquring knowledge about the world. The project is allocated to the whole semester not because you have to do a lot of drawn-out busywork to put together a big AI program, but so that you have time to understand these problems and what can (and can't) be done about them.
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