Re: Is Prolog a good language for generating semi-random, constrained solutions?

On 03/25/2014 03:43 PM, Alan Baljeu wrote:
>
>  > P.s.    When I was in Vienna, Markus and I chatted briefly about the
>  >    idea to have a Prolog thread `fork', i.e., a call that creates
>  >    a new thread as a copy of the running one.  This would require
>  >    some restrictions, i.e., we cannot fork if Prolog is called
>  >    from C in an arbitrary way.  Is that worth investigating at
>  >    some point?
>
> Can you have it sync-up?  It shouldn't matter to C if Prolog forks off a
> thread and then closes it before returning to caller.
> Or, you could return to caller but only the first thread ; all others
> terminate.  I think this construct is useful:
>
> first_to_complete(List of Callables) is semidet.

There is already available as first_solution/3 [1].  It is indeed not
really clear how these two would relate.  first_solution/3 would of
course copy the goal to multiple new threads, which are otherwise
empty.  A fork would clone all thread-specific data.  It is more useful
to split a computation and follow two different strategies to complete
it.  Hmmm.  Bit unclear ...

	Cheers --- Jan

[1]
http://www.swi-prolog.org/pldoc/doc_for?object=thread:first_solution/3