Development of Logic Programming: What went wrong, What was done about it, and What it might mean for the future

Logic Programming can be broadly defined as “using logic to deduce computational steps from existing propositions” (although this is somewhat controversial). The focus of this paper is on the development of this idea. Consequently, it does not treat any other associated topics related to Logic Programming such as constraints, abduction, etc.

The idea has a long development that went through many twists in which important questions turned out to have surprising answers including the following:

• Is computation reducible to logic?

• Are the laws of thought consistent?

This paper describes what went wrong at various points, what was done about it, and what it might mean for the future of Logic Programming.

The paper can be found at Development of Logic Programming: What went wrong, What was done about it, and What it might mean for the future.

Norms and Commitment for ORGs (Organizations of Restricted Generality): Strong Paraconsistency and Participatory Behavioral Model Checking

Organizations of Restricted Generality (ORGs) raise important issues for
commitment, norms, strong paraconsistency and model checking that require
extensions and revisions of previous foundational work.

For example, extension and revision is required of the fundamental assumption of the Event Calculus: Time-varying properties hold at particular time-points if they have been initiated by an action at some earlier time-point, and not terminated by another action in the meantime. The fundamental assumption of the Event Calculus is overly simplistic when it comes to organizations in which time-varying properties have to be actively maintained and managed in order to continue to hold and termination by another action is not required for a property to no longer hold. I.e., if active measures are not taken then things will go haywire by default. Consequently the Event Calculus approach must evolve into a strongly paraconsistent system structured around participations in space-time.

Similarly extension and revision is required for Model Checking properties of systems. Previously Model Checking as been performed using the model of nondeterministic automata based on states determined by time-points. These nondeterministic automata are not suitable for organizations, which are highly structured and operate asynchronously with only loosely bounded nondeterminism. Consequently Model Checking needs to evolve in the direction of verifying participatory behavior in Organizations.

PDF copy of the paper can be downloaded at: Norms and Commitment for ORGs (Organizations of Restricted Generality): Strong Paraconsistency and Participatory Behavioral Model Checking