Perlcast Interviews Ovid about Logic Programming

brian_d_foy on 2008-01-20T06:39:00

Back at the Nordic Perl Workshop 2007, I sat down with Ovid to talk about logic programming. Here is the audio for that interview.

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Thanks!

Ovid on 2008-01-20T11:02:42

I hope it gets people more interested in logic programming. It's a fascinating topic.

Interesting interview

sco08y on 2008-01-21T03:24:49

I think the big blocker for using artificial intelligence techniques is that many people have tried to use them and been burned when the technique they applied performs marginally better than the naive algorithm. I've studied, at least briefly, heuristic searches, simulated annealing, min-max trees, bayesian networks, hidden markov models, etc. If I had to implement one I could do it, but the bigger problem is choosing the right tool for the job and releasing maintainable code. Real life problems just don't look like the textbook examples.

Re:Interesting interview

Alias on 2008-01-21T04:19:13

The other tricky problem when using AI-type systems is your evaluation can in some cases fall victim to observation biases.

In order to test the AI system, you use it on a problem domain you already understand. So when you as an expert observer look at the results, they can appear underwhelming, since you can see how you would write a simple naive algorithm to achieve similar results.

And if you use it on a problem domain you DON'T understand, you aren't in a position to evaluate the results.

And that's the tricky bit... knowing when an AI routine is smart enough from observations of a problem domain you understand, that you trust it enough to use it in a problem domain you don't understand.