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Logic Programming Fall term 2014

The aim of this course is to introduce you to the theory and practice of logic programming. We teach it in two parts:

• Logic programming - theory: lectures given by Richard Mayr
• Logic programming - programming: lectures given by James Cheney

There will be 18 lectures, starting Monday 15th September 2014.

Lectures are in Lecture Theatre 4 of 7 Bristo Square.

Lectures take place 1510-1600 on Mondays and Thursdays in weeks 1-4 and 6-10 of Semester 1. (Note that there are no lectures in week 5, i.e., no lectures on 13th and 16th October.)

Tutorials are held in weeks 3-10. (Note that tutorials take place as usual in Week 5.)

There will be two, summatively assessed, coursework exercises; each worth 10% of the final grade.

Course timetable

Week	Begins	Mon Lec	Thu Lec	Tutorials	Coursework (CW)
1	15 Sep	Theory 1	Prog 1
2	22 Sep	Prog 2	Prog 3
3	29 Sep	Theory 2	Prog 4	Tut 1
4	6 Oct	Theory 3	Prog 5	Tut 2	CW1 handed out: Mon 6
5	13 Oct			Tut 3
6	20 Oct	Prog 6	Theory 4	Tut 4	CW1 deadline: 3pm Mon 20
7	27 Oct	Theory 5	Theory 6	Tut 5	CW2 handed out: Mon 27
8	3 Nov	Prog 7	Theory 7	Tut 6
9	10 Nov	Theory 8	Prog 8	Tut 7	CW2 deadline: 3pm Mon 10
10	17 Nov	Theory 9	Prog 9	Tut 8

Office hours

The course lecturers are available (during Semester 1) for discussion of course material at the following hours.

• Richard Mayr (IF 4.11): BA.
• James Cheney (IF 5.29): Friday 2:10-3pm.

Meetings outside these hours are also possible by appointment.

Course Text and Supplementary Material

The primary book for the programming side of the course is Learn Prolog Now, by Blackburn, Bos and Striegnitz. The book is strongly recommended, and is available free on-line.

Other useful books on prolog programming are

• Programming in Prolog by Clocksin and Mellish, Springer. (There are many copies of this in the University library.)
• The Art of Prolog by Sterling and Shapiro, MIT Press
• Prolog Programming for Artificial Intelligence by Ivan Bratko, Addison Wesley.

For the theory lectures, the following background material on propositional and predicate will be useful for students who have not previously encountered propositional and predicate logic.

• Wikipedia page on Propositional calculus
• Wikipedia page on First-order logic
• Wikipedia page on Structure (mathematical logic)
• Introductory slides (pdf) on Predicate logic and quantifiers from University of Nebraska

SICStus Prolog

SICStus Prolog is recommended for use in the course and will be used for the final exam. Any DICE machine (i.e. any Linux machine in an Informatics computer lab) should have SICStus installed; type sicstus at a command prompt to start.

The School also has a site license for student use, in case you would prefer to install and run SICStus on your own computer. Contact Computing Support in person or via this form to arrange this. Please specify which operating system you are running when requesting Sicstus (so Computing Support can send you the login details and appropriate OS license info in one response).

There is a good emacs mode for editing Prolog code and interacting with execution. To enable this mode for Prolog, add the following line to your .emacs file:

(load "/opt/sicstus-4.2.0/lib/sicstus-4.2.0/emacs/sicstus_emacs_init" t)

Then consulting a Prolog file will bring up a menu for Prolog features.

Introductory Prolog Programming Notes

To get you quickly informed of the essential aspects of the Prolog programming language, read the Quick Prolog notes. These refer to the Prolog programs: ancestors.pl, dcg.pl, declar_v_proc.pl and mapcolour.pl.

Prolog Programming Lecture Videos

Some lectures from this and previous years were recorded on video so if you want a re-run of those lectures then visit the video site for the full lectures; clips of smaller segments; and instructions on how to view them on the Informatics DICE system.

Programming Lecture Slides

Programming lecture slides will be posted here as the course proceeds.

• Lecture 1 (Getting started), September 18: PDF PPT. Reading: LPN chapter 1.

  (Accompanying code: simpsons.pl)

• Lecture 2 (Terms, unification and proof search), September 22: PDF PPT. Reading: LPN chapter 2.
• Lecture 3 (Recursion, lists and data structures), September 25: PDF PPT. Reading: LPN chapter 3 and chapter 4.
• Lecture 4 (Nonlogical features), October 2: PDF PPT. Reading: LPN chapter 5 and chapter 10.
• Lecture 5 (Nonlogical features, continued), October 9: PDF PPT. Reading: LPN chapter 10 and chapter 11.
• Lecture 6 (Parsing and definite clause grammars), October 20: PDF PPT. Reading: LPN chapter 7 and 8.
• Lecture 7 (Search strategies), November 6: PDF PPT. Reading: Bratko chapters 8, 11, 12, 13.
• Lecture 8 (Term manipulation, meta-programming), November 13: PDF PPT. Reading: LPN chapter 9, Bratko chapter 23.
• Lecture 9 (Constraint logic programming), November 20: PDF PPT.

Theory Lecture Slides

Theory lecture slides will be posted here as the course proceeds.

• Course Admin, September 15   (PDF)
• Lecture 1 (Definite Clause Propositional Logic), September 15   (PDF)
• Lecture 2 ((In)completeness of Prolog proof search), September 29   (PDF)
• Lecture 3 (Definite Clause Predicate Logic), October 6   (PDF)
• Lecture 4 (Proof Search for Definite Clause Predicate Logic), October 23   (PDF)
• Lecture 5 ((In)completeness for Definite Clause Predicate Logic), October 27   (PDF)
• Lecture 6 (Fixed Points and Herbrand Models), October 30   (PDF)
• Lecture 7 (Negation as Failure), November 6   (PDF)
• Lecture 8 (Extensions of Predicate Logic), November 10   (PDF)
• Lecture 9 (Higher Order LP), November 17   (PDF)

Coursework

There will be two, summatively assessed, coursework exercises; each worth 10% of the final grade. Once marked, the coursework will be returned to students with feedback.

• Coursework 1 (programming) was made available October 6: programming coursework

  Due: 3pm October 20.
  Returned to students: available to collect from ITO from November 3rd.

• Coursework 2 (theory) available since Oct. 24: theory coursework

  Due: 3pm November 10. Marked scripts will be available to collect from ITO from November 24th.

Tutorials

Tutorials start Week 3 (September 30). The tutorial group times and membership will be posted early in the semester. See tutorial groups with times and membership.

1. Tutorial for week 3 and the file that you should download for it: simpsons.pl.
2. Tutorial for week 4 and the file that you should download for it: deck.pl.
3. Week 5 quiz tutorial and solutions
   Supplementary material: 2012 Week 5 tutorial (2012_tutorial3.pdf) and outline solutions (2012_tutorial3_solutions.txt).
4. Tutorial for week 6 and solution.
5. Tutorial for week 7 and solution.
6. Tutorial for week 8 and solution.
7. Tutorial for week 9 and solution.
8. Tutorial for week 10.

Feedback

Formative feedback provides students with feedback on performance and understanding in time to assist with the assessed aspects of the course (coursework and exam).

Logic programming offers the following formative feedback:

• Interaction with tutors in tutorials provides general feedback on understanding.
• The week 5 tutorial will be a quiz tutorial. Solutions will be marked and discussed in tutorial.
• Both lecturers have office hours (see above) in which they are available to discuss any aspect of the course. You are very welcome to drop in either individually or in small groups (up to 3 students at a time).

In addition, both summatively assessed coursework exercises will be marked, commented and made available for students to collect 2 weeks after submission.

Previous Exams

• Past exams are available here.