Family Relations + PROLOG = ?

Jun 26, 2017

This time, we explored a little bit in the area of logical programming. You may think that this is not very related to AI, but as a matter of fact, it kinda is. AI is, after all, nothing but logical actions programmed to solve a particular problem normally solved by humans.

What we worked on was family relations (a small portion of The Simpsons TV show), modeled with PROLOG. By doing this modeling, we can see a bit of how it can be used: We can ask our model, for example, if two people have a certain relation with each other. Then, PROLOG will answer with a simple boolean: true or false. That’s all there is to it, but you can quickly see that PROLOG has a pretty good potential for modeling and solving more complex problems, even AI related problems. It was related to AI after all, don’t you agree?

Doing family relations is very simple. First, we had to declare the people on our “world”. We did so like this:

hombre(homero).
hombre(bart).
mujer(lisa).
mujer(marge).

Next, we started doing some basic relationships. Things like who are married and who are who’s suns.

son_esposos(homero,marge).
hijo(homero,bart).

And finaly, we made the rules for the rest of the relationships, such as is_gradpha and are_brothers

es_hermano(X,Y):- hijo(Z,X), hijo(Z,Y), hombre(X).
es_abuelo(X,Y):- hijo(X,Z), hijo(Z,Y), hombre(X).

You can see the rest of our code on GitHub! Happy Hacking!

Our Conclusions:

  • Felipe: I found Prolog to be an interesting method of programming. In this case we used it to make something very simple, but i can see how you can make something advanced with just some simple rules. I can’t wait to dive deeper into AI.
  • Adrian: Prolog turned out to be more intuitive the more we used it. It actually felt kind of natural to a point defining the relationships, and seeing how easily we can ask Prolog to see if some conclusions can be inferred from the data and relations we defined.
  • Kevin: I really didn’t love using Prolog. The bright side was that I felt this was a good excercise in remembering my first first-order logic class, and applying it to a real case scenario.