A Prolog Program

female(liz).
Prolog Reminder female(irene).
male(brendon).
male(emlyn).

ACSC 368 parent(liz,brendon).

parent(liz,emlyn).
parent(irene,liz).
Harris Papadopoulos
mother(X,Y) :- parent(X,Y), female(X).
grandparent(X,Y) :- parent(X,Z), parent(Z,Y).

Remember
• Each statement, ending in a full stop, is
called a clause.
• female, male are unary predicates.
• parent, mother, grandparent are binary
predicates.
• :- means IF and , means AND
• The clauses defining mother and
grandparent predicates are rules, and the
rest are facts.
Remember
• Variables start with an upper case letter or
_. There are no global variables in Prolog,
so the X and Y in rule for mother are
different from the X and Y in the rule for
grandparent.
• All clauses are statements of what is
assumed to be true, and each clause is
logically independent of the others. Hence
reordering clauses does not change the
meaning of the program.

Program Meaning Queries

Liz is female and Irene is female To solve a problem about a family, we use a query.
Brendon is male and Emlyn is male E.g. to discover who Liz is the mother of, enter query:
?- mother(liz,Child).
Liz is a parent of Brendon and Liz is a parent of Emlyn
Child = brendon;
and Irene is a parent of Liz
Child = emlyn;
For any X and Y, no
X is the mother of Y IF The query means ‘Find me a value of Child such that Liz
X is the parent of Y AND X is female
is the mother of Child.’
For any X and Y, First solution is Brendon.
X is the grandparent of Y IF there is some Z such that User enters ‘;’ to ask for a further solution, Emlyn.
X is the parent of Z AND Z is the parent of Y There are no more solutions.

1
 Exercise
Write Prolog queries to solve the following
problems, and state the solutions the Prolog
interpreter would find:
1. Who are the males in the family?
2. Who is Liz’s mother?
3. Who are the grandchildren of Irene?
A Route-Finding Problem
We have a simple network:
The problem is to find a route between any
two nodes and record it in a list.
The Meaning of Rules
The route from X to Y is [X,Y] if there is a
direct link from X to Y.
The route from X to Y starts with X, and the
rest of the route is the route from Z to Y,
where Z is a node you can reach by a single
direct link from X.
Lists in Prolog
• To represent a list of elements in a particular
order in Prolog, use a list structure, e.g.
[a,b,c,d,e].
• We can represent a list using notation [H|T] to
mean a head item H and a list T, the tail,
containing the rest of the elements in the list.
• E.g. if we unify the list [a,b,c,d,e] with [H|T]
the result is H = a, T = [b,c,d,e] if we unify the
list [a] with [H|T] the result is H = a, T = [].
Prolog for Route-Finding
link(a,b).
link(b,d).
link(b,c).
link(c,e).
link(e,b).
route_list(X,Y,[X,Y]):- link(X,Y).
route_list(X,Y,[X|Rest]):-
link(X,Z), route_list(Z,Y,Rest).
Exercise
Write a Prolog query to find all the routes
starting at b, and state the solutions the Prolog
interpreter would find.