My BarCamp Phuket presentation – Prolog as a dating aid
This Saturday I had a small presentation. It wasn’t really well prepared so I’ll try and make up for it here instead.
I wanted to demonstrate how Prolog, or in my case Pilog (same thing but different syntax), could be used to solve problems and query object databases. If you’ve been following my stuff on PicoLisp you won’t find much new.
First I began by setting up a simple Prolog environment to demonstrate how Pilog can be used in a setting free of object databases. The goal is to find a compatible woman. This is basically the same thing as the food example.
(be actionMovies (Jane))
(be actionMovies (Yoko))
(be durian (Kwan))
(be somTum (Kwan))
(be diving (Anna))
(be Japanese (Yoko))
(be blond (Anna))
(be petite (Yoko))
(be petite (Kwan))
(be sporty (Anna))
(be funny (Yoko))
(be likeBeer (Jane))
(be likeBeer (Anna))
(be speaksThai (Kwan))
(be likes (Tum @F) (actionMovies @F))
(be likes (Tum @F) (Japanese @F))
(be likes (Tum @F) (blond @F))
(be likes (Tum @F) (petite @F))
(be likes (Tum @F) (funny @F))
(be likes (Tum @F) (sporty @F))
(be likes (Tum @F) (likeBeer @F))
(be likes (Tum @F) (speaksThai @F))
(be likes (Tum @F) (durian @F))
(be likes (Tum @F) (somTum @F))
(be likes (Tum @F) (diving @F))
(let L NIL
(solve '((likes Tum @F))
(accu 'L @F 1) )
(flip (by cdr sort L)) )
(println L)The last sequence will output the woman Tum likes the most first and then in descending order. Try to fool around with it, starting with (? (likes Tum @F)) and then adding the rest step by step and see how the output changes for each step 🙂
Let’s move on to the database stuff. First we need to generate it, you can do that by running the following:
(class +Woman +Entity)
(rel id (+Key +Number))
(rel age (+Number))
(rel country (+Ref +Link) NIL (+Country))
(rel hair (+Ref +Link) NIL (+Color))
(rel smoking (+Number))
(rel tattoo (+Number))
(class +Country +Entity)
(rel name (+Key +String))
(class +Color +Entity)
(rel color (+Key +String))
(class +Likes +Entity)
(rel name (+Key +String))
(class +LikesCon +Entity)
(rel woman (+Aux +Ref +Link) (likes) NIL (+Woman))
(rel likes (+Ref +Link) NIL (+Likes))
(pool "bcamp_phuket.db")
(de randEls (Cls Key Amount)
(make
(let Lst (collect Key Cls)
(do Amount
(let Nth (rand 1 (length Lst))
(link (get Lst Nth)))))))
(de setup()
(mapc '((Col) (new! '(+Color) 'color Col)) '("red" "brown" "blond" "black"))
(mapc '((Like)(new! '(+Likes) 'name Like)) '("diving" "skiing" "partying" "pop" "rock" "alternative" "cars" "beer" "tennis" "wine" "golf" "geeks" "computers" "som tam" "gaeng som" "larb moo" "gaeng aum"))
(mapc '((Con) (new! '(+Country) 'name Con)) '("Sweden" "Thailand" "Japan")))
(de createWomen ()
(let N 0
(do 10000
(new! '(+Woman)
'age (rand 18 65)
'country (car (randEls '+Country 'name 1))
'hair (car (randEls '+Color 'color 1))
'smoking (rand 0 1)
'tattoo (rand 0 1)
'id (inc 'N)))))
(de createLikes ()
(for W (collect 'id '+Woman)
(for L (randEls '+Likes 'name 10)
(new! '(+LikesCon) 'woman W 'likes L))))
(setup)
(createWomen)
(createLikes)This example uses new!, it takes quite a while to generate the database like this. You could try new followed by a commit when all the objects have been created if you want this to go faster.
Let’s move on to the final piece, you run this after the above code, don’t forget to delete the three last function calls or comment them out first. The end could look like this:
#(setup)
#(createWomen)
#(createLikes)
(setq Start (usec))
(setq Women
(uniq
(mapcar '((Con)(; Con woman))
(solve
(quote
@C1 "Japan"
@C2 "Thailand"
@L1 "beer"
@L2 "diving"
@L3 "geeks"
@Tat 1
@Smo 0
(select (@Links)
(((name +Likes @L1 name +Likes @L2 name +Likes @L3) (likes +LikesCon)))
(or
((same @C1 @Links woman country name))
((same @C2 @Links woman country name)))
(same @Tat @Links woman tattoo)
(same @Smo @Links woman smoking)))
@Links ))))
(setq End (format (/ (- (usec) Start) 100000) 1))
(mapc
'((W)
(println
(; W country name)
(; W smoking)
(; W tattoo)
(collect 'woman '+LikesCon W W 'likes 'name))) Women)
(println
(pack
"There were "
(length Women)
" women matching the query out of 10000. The query took "
End
" seconds."))The above will fetch all women from Thailand and Japan who like one of beer, diving or geeks, she also needs to sport a tattoo and not smoke. We work through the connection of women to what they like, when we have them we proceed by extracting the women with ‘((Con)(; Con woman)) and cutting out duplicates with uniq.
We proceed by printing each woman’s relevant info and finally we print some statistics on how many hits we got and how long the fetch took.