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Comment by bmitc | Hacker News Reader

The associated book by the same name and author is very, very good. It's an excellent introduction to both the content specified by the title and Prolog. It shows the power of declarative programming in Prolog, where you basically right down the constraints of the problem you're trying to solve, and then it solves it for you.

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In theory. In practice writing a bunch of constraints without understanding how prolog search works will get you terrible performance. It's essential to give constraints so as to match the search algo. This is straightforwad and not a problem at all, but it's not a step you can omit when faced with a large (large = anything non-trivial) search space.

That's true. Although, the book does address this in instructive ways.

Thank you for the great comment. I will go get the book now.

No problem! It's a great introduction to Prolog.

With recent progress in AI, this is surprisingly outdated. Several assertions are rather weak and not all that useful.

Outdated in what sense or how?

Thinking as Computation was developed from a course meant to introduce first-year students, from a wide variety of disciplines, to the topic. The prerequisites are thus very light and require little more than high school mathematics and no programming experience.

The author directly describes the scope and context of the book in the preface, and it was primarily designed to give students hands-on experience on the topics. Prolog turned put to be a successful choice in teaching students with no programming background and helped guide the course material.

The book isn't really an introduction to AI, although the topic lies within the larger umbrella of AI.

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