I'm looking for a way to count the numbers of predicates.
Example:
%facts
has_subclass(thing,animal).
has_subclass(thing,tree).
has_subclass(thing,object).
% and I ask
count_has_subclass(thing,X).
% result
X = 3.
For facts like your example:
count_has_subclass(What, Count):-
findall(1, call(has_subclass(What, _)), L),
length(L, Count).
We can use findall/3 for this, and then use length/2 to obtain the length of the list:
count_has_subclass(What, N):-
findall(X, has_subclass(What, X), L),
length(L, N).
If it is however possible that has_subclass/2 yields the same values multiple times for a given key (like thing), then we can use for example sort/2 as a duplicate filter, like:
count_has_subclass(What, N):-
findall(X, has_subclass(What, X), L),
sort(L, S), %% remove duplicates
length(S, N).
Note that if What is a free variable, then you will count all yeilds of has_subclass(_, _). (optionally with a uniqness filter on the second parameter).
Using the standard setof/3 is a better option as it allows easy definition of a more general predicate that can enumerate solutions when the class argument is not bound. For example, assume the following database:
has_subclass(thing,animal).
has_subclass(thing,tree).
has_subclass(thing,object).
has_subclass(animal,cat).
has_subclass(animal,dog).
has_subclass(tree,pine).
has_subclass(tree,oak).
And the definition:
subclass_count(Class, Count) :-
setof(Subclass, has_subclass(Class, Subclass), Subclasses),
length(Subclasses, Count).
Sample call:
| ?- subclass_count(Class, Count).
Class = animal
Count = 2 ? ;
Class = thing
Count = 3 ? ;
Class = tree
Count = 2
yes
If you try instead one of the findall/3 solutions in the other answers, we get instead:
| ?- count_has_subclass(What, Count).
Count = 7
But note that this solution also have a sensible interpretation as returning the number of all existing subclasses when the class is not specified.
To build a list just to count solutions seems 'old style', but in traditional Prolog there is only the DB (assert/retract) alternative to overcome the 'stateless' nature of computations. Indeed findall/3 and friends builtins could be (naively) rewritten by means of assert/retract. But something have shown up since the early 80's ages :). I illustrate with SWI-Prolog, but - more or less naively - all of them could be implemented by assert/retract. Of course, most Prolog implementations have 'non logical' (or 'imperative', or 'impure') facilities to implement such basic task, without resorting to the heavyweight DB interface - like setarg/3, nb_setval/2 and others...
I digress... library(aggregate) should be shown first:
?- aggregate(count, T^has_subclass(thing,T), C).
C = 3.
This lib is well worth to study, does a lot more than - efficiently - counting...
Another, recent, addition is library(solution_sequences). It's not more efficient than setof/3 + length/2, guess, but interesting in its own. Counting is a bit more involved, and uses call_nth/2:
?- order_by([desc(C)],call_nth(has_subclass(thing,T),C)).
C = 3,
T = object ;
...
Some far simpler code of mine, based on nb_setarg/3 (and help from #false):
?- [carlo(snippets/lag)].
true.
?- integrate(count,has_subclass(thing,T),C).
C = 3.
I am trying to develop a prolog procedure that will convert numbers in any given list to a list of their square roots, using the univ (=..). So far I have
convert(X,Y): number(X), Y is X^2.
use([],_,[]).
use([_|X],convert,L):-
convert(X,Y),
L =..[convert,X,Y].
This evaluates false, what could be wrong in my logic or execution?
You could also use maplist/3 to define use/2 with convert/2 as defined in your post:
use(X,Y) :- maplist(convert, X, Y).
?- use([1,2,3],L).
L = [1,4,9]
Note that use/2 is simply failing for lists that contain anything but numbers:
?- use([1,2,3,a],L).
no
There are multiple errors:
why passing the name of the predicate convert/2?
Most important I see no recursive call!!
You ignore head element of the list by writing [_|X] which means a list with a head element and a tail X.
You try to use convert on X which is a list and assign the atom convert(X,Y) to L. Note that prolog is not a procedural language, convert(X,Y) will work only by just calling convert(X,Y) and the result will be in Y, you can't make assignments like: L = convert(X,Y) this will only assign the atom convert(X,Y) to L.
You don't need the operator =.., as a simple solution would be:
convert(X,Y):- number(X), Y is X^2.
use([],[]).
use([H|T],[Y|T1]):-
convert(H,Y),
use(T,T1).
min_member(-Min, +List)
True when Min is the smallest member in the standard order of terms. Fails if List is empty.
?- min_member(3, [1,2,X]).
X = 3.
The explanation is of course that variables come before all other terms in the standard order of terms, and unification is used. However, the reported solution feels somehow wrong.
How can it be justified? How should I interpret this solution?
EDIT:
One way to prevent min_member/2 from succeeding with this solution is to change the standard library (SWI-Prolog) implementation as follows:
xmin_member(Min, [H|T]) :-
xmin_member_(T, H, Min).
xmin_member_([], Min0, Min) :-
( var(Min0), nonvar(Min)
-> fail
; Min = Min0
).
xmin_member_([H|T], Min0, Min) :-
( H #>= Min0
-> xmin_member_(T, Min0, Min)
; xmin_member_(T, H, Min)
).
The rationale behind failing instead of throwing an instantiation error (what #mat suggests in his answer, if I understood correctly) is that this is a clear question:
"Is 3 the minimum member of [1,2,X], when X is a free variable?"
and the answer to this is (to me at least) a clear "No", rather than "I can't really tell."
This is the same class of behavior as sort/2:
?- sort([A,B,C], [3,1,2]).
A = 3,
B = 1,
C = 2.
And the same tricks apply:
?- min_member(3, [1,2,A,B]).
A = 3.
?- var(B), min_member(3, [1,2,A,B]).
B = 3.
The actual source of confusion is a common problem with general Prolog code. There is no clean, generally accepted classification of the kind of purity or impurity of a Prolog predicate. In a manual, and similarly in the standard, pure and impure built-ins are happily mixed together. For this reason, things are often confused, and talking about what should be the case and what not, often leads to unfruitful discussions.
How can it be justified? How should I interpret this solution?
First, look at the "mode declaration" or "mode indicator":
min_member(-Min, +List)
In the SWI documentation, this describes the way how a programmer shall use this predicate. Thus, the first argument should be uninstantiated (and probably also unaliased within the goal), the second argument should be instantiated to a list of some sort. For all other uses you are on your own. The system assumes that you are able to check that for yourself. Are you really able to do so? I, for my part, have quite some difficulties with this. ISO has a different system which also originates in DEC10.
Further, the implementation tries to be "reasonable" for unspecified cases. In particular, it tries to be steadfast in the first argument. So the minimum is first computed independently of the value of Min. Then, the resulting value is unified with Min. This robustness against misuses comes often at a price. In this case, min_member/2 always has to visit the entire list. No matter if this is useful or not. Consider
?- length(L, 1000000), maplist(=(1),L), min_member(2, L).
Clearly, 2 is not the minimum of L. This could be detected by considering the first element of the list only. Due to the generality of the definition, the entire list has to be visited.
This way of handling output unification is similarly handled in the standard. You can spot those cases when the (otherwise) declarative description (which is the first of a built-in) explicitly refers to unification, like
8.5.4 copy_term/2
8.5.4.1 Description
copy_term(Term_1, Term_2) is true iff Term_2 unifies
with a term T which is a renamed copy (7.1.6.2) of
Term_1.
or
8.4.3 sort/2
8.4.3.1 Description
sort(List, Sorted) is true iff Sorted unifies with
the sorted list of List (7.1.6.5).
Here are those arguments (in brackets) of built-ins that can only be understood as being output arguments. Note that there are many more which effectively are output arguments, but that do not need the process of unification after some operation. Think of 8.5.2 arg/3 (3) or 8.2.1 (=)/2 (2) or (1).
8.5.4 1 copy_term/2 (2),
8.4.2 compare/3 (1),
8.4.3 sort/2 (2),
8.4.4 keysort/2 (2),
8.10.1 findall/3 (3),
8.10.2 bagof/3 (3),
8.10.3 setof/3 (3).
So much for your direct questions, there are some more fundamental problems behind:
Term order
Historically, "standard" term order1 has been defined to permit the definition of setof/3 and sort/2 about 1982. (Prior to it, as in 1978, it was not mentioned in the DEC10 manual user's guide.)
From 1982 on, term order was frequently (erm, ab-) used to implement other orders, particularly, because DEC10 did not offer higher-order predicates directly. call/N was to be invented two years later (1984) ; but needed some more decades to be generally accepted. It is for this reason that Prolog programmers have a somewhat nonchalant attitude towards sorting. Often they intend to sort terms of a certain kind, but prefer to use sort/2 for this purpose — without any additional error checking. A further reason for this was the excellent performance of sort/2 beating various "efficient" libraries in other programming languages decades later (I believe STL had a bug to this end, too). Also the complete magic in the code - I remember one variable was named Omniumgatherum - did not invite copying and modifying the code.
Term order has two problems: variables (which can be further instantiated to invalidate the current ordering) and infinite terms. Both are handled in current implementations without producing an error, but with still undefined results. Yet, programmers assume that everything will work out. Ideally, there would be comparison predicates that produce
instantiation errors for unclear cases like this suggestion. And another error for incomparable infinite terms.
Both SICStus and SWI have min_member/2, but only SICStus has min_member/3 with an additional argument to specify the order employed. So the goal
?- min_member(=<, M, Ms).
behaves more to your expectations, but only for numbers (plus arithmetic expressions).
Footnotes:
1 I quote standard, in standard term order, for this notion existed since about 1982 whereas the standard was published 1995.
Clearly min_member/2 is not a true relation:
?- min_member(X, [X,0]), X = 1.
X = 1.
yet, after simply exchanging the two goals by (highly desirable) commutativity of conjunction, we get:
?- X = 1, min_member(X, [X,0]).
false.
This is clearly quite bad, as you correctly observe.
Constraints are a declarative solution for such problems. In the case of integers, finite domain constraints are a completely declarative solution for such problems.
Without constraints, it is best to throw an instantiation error when we know too little to give a sound answer.
This is a common property of many (all?) predicates that depend on the standard order of terms, while the order between two terms can change after unification. Baseline is the conjunction below, which cannot be reverted either:
?- X #< 2, X = 3.
X = 3.
Most predicates using a -Value annotation for an argument say that pred(Value) is the same
as pred(Var), Value = Var. Here is another example:
?- sort([2,X], [3,2]).
X = 3.
These predicates only represent clean relations if the input is ground. It is too much to demand the input to be ground though because they can be meaningfully used with variables, as long as the user is aware that s/he should not further instantiate any of the ordered terms. In that sense, I disagree with #mat. I do agree that constraints can surely make some of these relations sound.
This is how min_member/2 is implemented:
min_member(Min, [H|T]) :-
min_member_(T, H, Min).
min_member_([], Min, Min).
min_member_([H|T], Min0, Min) :-
( H #>= Min0
-> min_member_(T, Min0, Min)
; min_member_(T, H, Min)
).
So it seems that min_member/2 actually tries to unify Min (the first argument) with the smallest element in List in the standard order of terms.
I hope I am not off-topic with this third answer. I did not edit one of the previous two as I think it's a totally different idea. I was wondering if this undesired behaviour:
?- min_member(X, [A, B]), A = 3, B = 2.
X = A, A = 3,
B = 2.
can be avoided if some conditions can be postponed for the moment when A and B get instantiated.
promise_relation(Rel_2, X, Y):-
call(Rel_2, X, Y),
when(ground(X), call(Rel_2, X, Y)),
when(ground(Y), call(Rel_2, X, Y)).
min_member_1(Min, Lst):-
member(Min, Lst),
maplist(promise_relation(#=<, Min), Lst).
What I want from min_member_1(?Min, ?Lst) is to expresses a relation that says Min will always be lower (in the standard order of terms) than any of the elements in Lst.
?- min_member_1(X, L), L = [_,2,3,4], X = 1.
X = 1,
L = [1, 2, 3, 4] .
If variables get instantiated at a later time, the order in which they get bound becomes important as a comparison between a free variable and an instantiated one might be made.
?- min_member_1(X, [A,B,C]), B is 3, C is 4, A is 1.
X = A, A = 1,
B = 3,
C = 4 ;
false.
?- min_member_1(X, [A,B,C]), A is 1, B is 3, C is 4.
false.
But this can be avoided by unifying all of them in the same goal:
?- min_member_1(X, [A,B,C]), [A, B, C] = [1, 3, 4].
X = A, A = 1,
B = 3,
C = 4 ;
false.
Versions
If the comparisons are intended only for instantiated variables, promise_relation/3 can be changed to check the relation only when both variables get instantiated:
promise_relation(Rel_2, X, Y):-
when((ground(X), ground(Y)), call(Rel_2, X, Y)).
A simple test:
?- L = [_, _, _, _], min_member_1(X, L), L = [3,4,1,2].
L = [3, 4, 1, 2],
X = 1 ;
false.
! Edits were made to improve the initial post thanks to false's comments and suggestions.
I have an observation regarding your xmin_member implementation. It fails on this query:
?- xmin_member(1, [X, 2, 3]).
false.
I tried to include the case when the list might include free variables. So, I came up with this:
ymin_member(Min, Lst):-
member(Min, Lst),
maplist(#=<(Min), Lst).
Of course it's worse in terms of efficiency, but it works on that case:
?- ymin_member(1, [X, 2, 3]).
X = 1 ;
false.
?- ymin_member(X, [X, 2, 3]).
true ;
X = 2 ;
false.
I am learning Prolog and I understand how to calculate the sum of a list but I can't figure out how to compute the sum of the fields of a database.
Sample database:
tastiness(bacon,100,200,300,400,500).
tastiness(lettuce,3,5,6,7,12).
Sample output
(bacon,1500).
(lettuce,33).
Here's how to sum the values of a list in standard Prolog:
sumlist([], 0).
sumlist([X|Xs], Sum) :-
sumlist(Xs, SumTail),
Sum is X + SumTail.
If you have something like
bacon(100).
bacon(200).
bacon(300).
bacon(400).
bacon(500).
you could then use the findall predicate. The findall predicate works as follows: If you want Z = [100, 200, 300, 400, 500] (the list of all bacon numbers) you write findall(X, bacon(X), Z).
Here's how to sum all bacon numbers:
| ?- findall(X, bacon(X), AllBacon), sumlist(AllBacon, SumBacon).
AllBacon = [100,200,300,400,500]
SumBacon = 1500
yes
As a side note, the sum computation proposed by #aioobe is not optimal because on a very large list, you will run out of call stack memory.
A particular technique is to put the recursive call of the predicate as the last element of your predicate. This way, all preceding things being already computed, Prolog can flush the current context of the predicate while making the recursive call. On a list with 1M elements, that means than you will run with 1 context being kept instead of up to one million.
While it may not seem important to you for this particular exercise, the tail call optimization is what makes recursion as powerful as iteration, if you take space consumption into consideration. It's worth learning!
Here is a version on which Tail Call Optimization is performable:
sumlist(List, Result) :-
sumlist(List, 0, Result).
sumlist([], Acc, Acc).
sumlist([Item|List], Acc, Result) :-
NewAcc is Acc + Item.
sumlist(List, NewAcc, Result).
It makes use of an idiom you will encounter a lot in declarative programming: an accumulator (here named Acc). Its purpose is to hold the resulting value "up until now" during the recursion.
I wrote a bubble sort in Prolog (code below). It works but it smells. I'm quite new to prolog. Here's the problematic part:
% Problem: convert the true value to something
% I can actually use.
sorted_value(X,X) :- sorted(X).
sorted_value(X,[]) :- not(sorted(X)).
It's weird I need to use this function to convert a True value to something (in this case, []) and False to another thing in order to use them. Isn't there a cleaner way?
% Bubble Sort a list.
% is the list sorted?
sorted([]).
sorted([Head|[]]).
sorted([First|[Second|Rest]]) :-
min(First,Second,First),
sorted([Second|Rest]).
% swap all pairs in the list that
% needs to be swapped
bubble_sort_list([], []).
bubble_sort_list([Head|[]],[Head]).
bubble_sort_list([First|[Second|Rest]], [One|Solution]) :-
min(First,Second, One),
max(First,Second,Two),
bubble_sort_list([Two|Rest],Solution).
% Problem: convert the true value to something
% I can actually use.
sorted_value(X,X) :- sorted(X).
sorted_value(X,[]) :- not(sorted(X)).
% Repeatedly call bubble_sort until
% the list is sorted
bubble_sort_helper([],List, Solution) :-
bubble_sort_list(List, SortedList),
sorted_value(SortedList, Value),
bubble_sort_helper(Value,SortedList, Solution).
bubble_sort_helper(A,List,List).
% this is what you call.
buuble_sort(List,Solution) :-
bubble_sort_helper([],List,Solution).
Every predicate call either succeeds (possibly several times) or fails. If you think declaratively and really describe what a sorted list is, there would only rarely seem to be a need to explicitly represent the truth value itself in a program. Rather, it would typically suffice to place a predicate call like "ascending(List)" in a Prolog program to describe the case of a sorted list. There seems to be no advantage to instead call a predicate like "ascending(List, T)" and then use T to distinguish the cases. Why not use the implicit truth value of the predicate itself directly? If you really need to reify the truth value, you can for example do it like this to avoid calling ascending/1 twice:
ascending(Ls, T) :-
( ascending(Ls) -> T = true
; T = false
).
Notice how the truth of ascending/1 is used to distinguish the cases.