3.1 Individuals and Relations

AILog can be used for propositional reasoning, but can also be used for relational reasoning.

The syntax of variables and predicates is based on Prolog's syntax in its convention for variables, but uses a different syntax for operators (because Prolog's are so confusing and to emphasize AILog is not Prolog).

A variable is a sequence of alphanumeric characters (possibly including "_") that starts with an upper case letter or "_". For example, X, Letter, Any_cat, A_big_dog are all variables. The variable "_" in an anonymous variable which means that all occurrences are assumed to be different variables. If a variable occurs only once in a clause, it should probably be written as "_".

A constant is either:

  • a sequence of alphanumeric characters (possibly including "_") starting with a lower case letter, such as: david, comp_intell, ailog, and a45_23
  • an integer or float, such as 123, -5, 1.0, -3.14159, 4.5E7, -0.12e+8, and 12.0e-9. There must be a decimal point in floats written with an exponent and at least one digit before and after a decimal point.
  • any sequence of characters delimited by single quotes, such as 'X', '2b~2b', '../ch2/foo.pl', 'A Tall Person'

A term is either a variable, a constant, of of the form f(t1,...,tn), where f, a function symbol, is a sequence of alphanumeric characters (possibly including "_") starting with a lower case letter and the ti are terms.

An atom is either of the form p or p(t1,...,tn), where p, a predicate symbol, is a sequence of alphanumeric characters (including _) starting with a lower case letter and the ti are terms. Given this definition for atoms, the rest of the syntax is the same as the propositional case. Some predicate and function symbols can be written using infix notation. For example "X is 4+3*Y" means the same as "is(X,+(4,*(3,Y)))", where "is" is a predicate symbol and "+" and "*" are function symbols. The operator precedence follows Prolog's conventions.

The symbol "<=" is defined to be infix, but there are no clauses defining it. This is designed to be used for meta-programming where "<=" can be used as a meta-level predicate symbol defining the object-level implication. (See Artificial Intelligence [Poole and Mackworth (2010)], Chapter 13).