Investigation of design and execution alternatives for the committed choice non-deterministic logic languages

Abstract

The general area of developing, applying and studying new and parallel models of computation is motivated by a need to overcome the limits of current Von Neumann based architectures. A key area of research in understanding how new technology can be applied to Al problem solving is through using logic languages. Logic programming languages provide a procedural interpretation for sentences of first order logic, mainly using a class of sentence called Horn clauses. Horn clauses are open to a wide variety of parallel evaluation models, giving possible speed-ups and alternative parallel models of execution. The research in this thesis is concerned with investigating one class of parallel logic language known as Committed Choice Non-Deterministic languages. The investigation considers the inherent parallel behaviour of Al programs implemented in the CCND languages and the effect of various alternatives open to language implementors and designers. This is achieved by considering how various Al programming techniques map to alternative language designs and the behaviour of these Al programs on alternative implementations of these languages. The aim of this work is to investigate how Al programming techniques are affected (qualitatively and quantitatively) by particular language features. The qualitative evaluation is a consideration of how Al programs can be mapped to the various CCND languages. The applications considered are general search algorithms (which focuses on the committed choice nature of the languages); chart parsing (which focuses on the differences between safe and unsafe languages); and meta-level inference (which focuses on the difference between deep and flat languages). The quantitative evaluation considers the inherent parallel behaviour of the resulting programs and the effect of possible implementation alternatives on this inherent behaviour. To carry out this quantitative evaluation we have implemented a system which improves on the current interpreter based evaluation systems. The new system has an improved model of execution and allows several