The design of the following treatise is to investigate the fundamental laws of those operations of the mind by which reasoning is performed; to give expression to them in the symbolical language of a Calculus, and upon this foundation … to collect from the various elements of truth brought to view in the course of these inquiries some probable intimations concerning the nature and constitution of the human mind. — G. Boole, The Laws of Thought, 1854.

  1. Chapter 7

    1. Sections 7.1–7.5 - Study the basics of logic and familiarize yourself with propositional logic.
      1. Syntax vs. Semantics
      2. Soundness vs. Completeness
      3. Propositions and Logical Connectives
      4. Proof by Resolution

    This unit covers a considerable amount of material from the text. Focus on the discussions and examples from class and on logic programming in Prolog.

  2. The Learn Prolog Now! tutorial (LPN!):

    1. You’ll be using SWI Prolog, an open-source implementation of Prolog developed at the Sociaal-WetenschappeLijke Informatica (SWI) group at the University of Amsterdam. This tool is installed in the lab and you can easily install on your own machine.

    2. LPN! Chapter 1 - Facts, Rules and Queries

      1. Do the “Practical Session” in Section 1.4 first. You should be able to start SWI Prolog on your system and do the exercises at the command prompt. We suggest creating the specified knowledge bases as separate files (see LPN! knowledge bases) and executing them on your system. SWI Prolog will automatically load the file and set its local directory appropriately.
      2. Read Sections 1.1-2, and work through their examples.
      3. We’ll look at some of the exercises in Section 1.3 during lab.

    3. LPN! Chapter 2 - Unification and Proof Search

      1. Read Sections 2.1-2, and work through their examples.
      2. Do the “Practical Session” in Section 2.4.
      3. We’ll look at some of the exercises in Section 2.3 during lab.