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2022: The Year of Prolog
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2022: The Year of Prolog
Organized by The Association for Logic Programming and The Prolog Heritage Association
In the summer of 1972, Alain Colmerauer and his team in Marseille developed and implemented the first version of the logic programming language Prolog. Together with both earlier and later collaborations with Robert Karl's and his colleagues in Edinburgh, this work laid the practical and theoretical foundations for the Prolog and logic programming of today. Prolog and its related technologies soon became key tools of symbolic programming and Artificial Intelligence.
The Year of Prolog celebrated the 50th anniversary of these events and highlighted the continuing significance of Prolog and Logic Programming both for symbolic, explainable AI, and for computing more generally. It also aimed to inspire a new generation of students, by introducing them to a more human-friendly, logic-based approach to computing.
The initiatives of the Year of Prolog included:
- The inaugural edition of the Alain Colmerauer Prolog Heritage Prize (in short: the Alain Colmerauer Prize) for recent practical accomplishments that highlight the benefits of Prolog-inspired computing for the future.
- A Prolog Day Symposium was celebrated on November 10, 2022, with a number of talks, panels, videos, awards, a brochure, etc. and in which the Alain Colmerauer Prize was awarded. Subsequent editions of the prize are awarded at the corresponding year's International Conference on Logic Programming, starting with ICLP 2023.
- A Prolog Education initiative, which will use Prolog to introduce schoolchildren and young adults to logic, programming, and AI and also map and provide Prolog education resources for educators. This is a long-term initiative that is being continued into the future.
- The survey paper Fifty Years of Prolog and Beyond was written, and published in the 20th anniversary special issue of the ALP journal Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP), Cambridge U. Press.
- There were further activities such as special sessions and invited talks at other events and conferences, including at the 2022 International Conference on Logic Programming, ICLP'22, held as part of the Federated Logic Conference.
- The book Prolog: The Next 50 years, aimed at a broad audience, was published in the Springer/Nature Publishing LNCS/LNAI series.
- ICLP 2023 marked the closing of a year of Prolog celebrations. It included the award of the 2023 ALP Alain Colmerauer Prize, and presentations of progress on the Prolog book, education, online Prolog community, and other activities.
NOTE: The followup activities from the Year of Prolog are grouped in the Online Prolog Community.
The Year of Prolog and its activities, including the Alain Colmerauer Prize, are sponsored by the Association for Logic Programming, the Prolog Heritage Association, the AI Journal, Institut Carnot Cognition, and Institut Fredrik Bull, among others.
