Was initially nonplussed, but toward the end I realized the choice of pokemon for an example actually works out well for showing how prologue can solve problems. I’m now a bit curious about trying it out somewhere.
Simple general-purpose opponents can be coded using just recursive backtracking search, while more advanced ones (supporting moves that need to destructively change state) can still be conveniently modelled by reifying facts and thereby enable backtracking over assert/retract-like Prolog DB modifications, as used in discrete combinatorial planners [1].
[1]: https://quantumprolog.sgml.net/container-planning-demo/part1...
Datalog, instead, is "underneath" implementing a TP-Operator, a procedure that finds the fix-point of a Datalog program which happens to be the same as its Least Herbrand Model, which is what SLD-Resolution also finds, except that SLD-Resolution allows functions and does not guarantee termination, like Datalog does. The big advantage of a TP Operator is the termination guarantees and it can be implemented so that it's efficient, but it's still limited, and the fact that there are many different flavours of Datalog (with or without stratified negation, arithmetic, lists etc) is testament to the difficulty of improving on Prolog's efficiency without breaking its soundness or completeness. Or, like I always say, "sound, complete, efficient: choose two".
Mostly what I mean above is that Prolog is a hard balancing act, specifically balancing efficient execution with the practicalities of programming (e.g. lists, database asserts/retracts, I/O etc) and the theoretical underpinnings of Horn logic and SLD-Resolution. There's a lot of stuff that went into Prolog and its development process is quite distinct to any other language I'm aware of, where there wasn't like a central committee or an enlightened dictator, or a small band of hard-headed academics (...Haskell...) and so on, but instead there was a decades-long academic research process of going from First-Order Logic to Herbrand semantics, to definite logic, to Resolution, to Linear Resolution, to Linear Resolution with a Selection Rule, to Linear Resolution with a Selection Rule restricted to Definite clauses, to Negation-As-Failure under a Closed World Assumption, and finally to a language with an automated theorem prover as an interpreter and a clunky mockery of FOL syntax and terminology that isn't even complete (despite Resolution being complete); a process with no centralised structure instead split across multiple acadmics in several universities in the UK, in France, and in Japan.
Another way to see Prolog is that it's the result of a very peculiar academic process that is hard to replicate and that yielded a result that is difficult to outdo, with all its compromises; because of its compromises. Because its particular compromises were made to solve hard problems and were arrived at after a long, collaborative process that won't be easily outdone. Not that attempts haven't been made. For example, in logic programming circles Prolog is now considered a little bit quaint, even outdated. Most of the activity has shifted to Answer Set Programming (ASP). And that makes sense, Prolog is old news. ASP is the new kid on the block, it's only 30 years old! And like normal programming languages it was designed by a couple of people before being adopted by a wider community.
I just really don't know how any of that maps to Rust.
And yet Prolog can express all examples in the article. For these kinds of problems, giving up TC is mostly a feature. And if you need more expressiveness, there's a lot of practical Datalog-ish systems that can recover Turing completeness (Flix, Formulog, parts of Souffle), while still being saner than SWI Prolog and co. for this type of work, as you generally don't have to care about atom order or search order in the same way. They act so much more predictably.
https://www.broadlearners.com/t/understanding-the-meaning-of...
https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/whole-nother
https://old.reddit.com/r/etymology/comments/13s19j0/wtf_happ...
In my case, I was using it as almost a blend of the two meanings, something mostly meaning “unimpressed”, with a touch of “and a bit perplexed why such effort is going into this”. Basically a shoulder shrug and “okay…?”
I now find myself nonplussed, wondering if I should be using the word at all given it seems to have two opposite meanings.