Puzzles, PROLOG and Logic

Abstract

Puzzles have been and continue to be very effective agents for the presentation of logic. Recently, PROLOG has been suggested as the tool of choice for approaching “virtually all” logic problems. One of Smullyan's puzzles is used to demonstrate this thesis. We question this rush to PROLOG and its associated procedural interpretation of logic. We give a simple puzzle (definitely not of the Lewis Carroll or Smullyan caliber) and our PROLOG solutions. Our problems in applying PROLOG to this puzzle in turn lead us to try to discover the logic roots of PROLOG. © 1987, ACM. All rights reserved.