cugini@NBS-VMS.ARPA ("CUGINI, JOHN") (10/16/86)
[Forwarded from the Prolog Digest by Laws@SRI-STRIPE.] I'm in the middle of reading the Bratko book, and I would give it a very high rating. The concepts are explained very clearly, there are lots of good examples, and the applications covered are of high interest. Part I (chapters 1-8) is about Prolog per se. Part II (chapters 9-16) shows how to implement many standard AI techniques: chap. 9 - Operations on Data Structures chap. 10 - Advanced Tree Representations chap. 11 - Basic Problem-solving Strategies chap. 12 - Best-first: a heuristic search principle chap. 13 - Problem reduction and AND/OR graphs chap. 14 - Expert Systems chap. 15 - Game Playing chap. 16 - Pattern-directed Programming Part I has 188 pages, part II has 214. You didn't mention Programming in Prolog by Clocksin & Mellish - this is also very good, and covers some things that Bratko doesn't (it's more concerned with non-AI applications), but all in all, I slightly prefer Bratko's book. -- John Cugini