Interactive Problem Solving in Prolog

This article examines the use of the Prolog language for writing verification, analysis and transformation tools. Guided by experience in teaching and the development of verification tools like ProB or specialisation tools like ECCE and LOGEN, the article presents an assessment of various aspects of Prolog and provides guidelines for using them. The article shows the usefulness of a few key Prolog features. In particular, it discusses how to deal with negation at the level of...

When working on intelligent tutor systems designed for mathematics education and its specificities, an interesting objective is to provide relevant help to the students by anticipating their next steps. This can only be done by knowing, beforehand, the possible ways to solve a problem. Hence the need for an automated theorem prover that provide proofs as they would be written by a student. To achieve this objective, logic programming is a natural tool due to the similarity of...

Children learn though play. We introduce the analogous idea of learning programs through play. In this approach, a program induction system (the learner) is given a set of tasks and initial background knowledge. Before solving the tasks, the learner enters an unsupervised playing stage where it creates its own tasks to solve, tries to solve them, and saves any solutions (programs) to the background knowledge. After the playing stage is finished, the learner enters the supervi...

This paper contains examples for a companion paper "The Prolog Debugger and Declarative Programming", which discusses (in)adequacy of the Prolog debugger for declarative programming. Logic programming is a declarative programming paradigm. Programming language Prolog makes logic programming possible, at least to a substantial extent. However the Prolog debugger works solely in terms of the operational semantics. So it is incompatible with declarative programming. The compan...

This paper investigates how high school students approach computing through an introductory computer science course situated in the Logic Programming (LP) paradigm. This study shows how novice students operate within the LP paradigm while engaging in foundational computing concepts and skills, and presents a case for LP as a viable paradigm choice for introductory CS courses.

Collaboration is an important problem-solving skill; however, novice collaboration generally benefits from some kind of support. One possibility for supporting productive conversations between collaborators is to encourage pairs of students to provide explanations for their problem-solving steps. To test this possibility, we contrasted individuals who were instructed to self-explain problem-solving steps with dyads who were instructed to jointly explain problem-solving steps ...

This paper investigates how high school students in an introductory computer science course approach computing in the Logic Programming (LP) paradigm. This qualitative study shows how novice students operate within the LP paradigm while engaging in foundational computing concepts and skills: students are engaged in a cyclical process of abstraction, reasoning, and creating representations of their ideas in code while also being informed by the (procedural) requirements and th...

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is an expressive knowledge representation and reasoning framework. Due to its rather simple syntax paired with high-performance solvers, ASP is interesting for industrial applications. However, to err is human and thus debugging is an important activity during the development process. Therefore, tools for debugging non-ground answer set programs are needed. In this paper, we present a new graphical debugging interface for non-ground answer set pro...

This volume contains papers presented at WLPE 2005, 15th International Workshop on Logic-based methods in Programming Environments. The aim of the workshop is to provide an informal meeting for the researchers working on logic-based tools for development and analysis of programs. This year we emphasized two aspects: on one hand the presentation, pragmatics and experiences of tools for logic programming environments; on the other one, logic-based environmental tools for prog...

The Eleventh Workshop on Logic Programming Environments (WLPE'01) was one in a series of international workshops in the topic area. It was held on December 1, 2001 in Paphos, Cyprus as a post-conference workshop at ICLP 2001. Eight refereed papers were presented at the conference. A majority of the papers involved, in some way, constraint logic programming and tools for software development. Other topics areas addressed include execution visualization, instructional aids (for...