Paradigms of AI Programming: Preface

paradigm n 1 an example or pattern; esp an outstandingly clear or typical example.

-Longman's Dictionary of the English Language, 1984

This book is concerned with three related topics: the field of artificial intelligence, or AI; the skill of computer programming; and the programming language Common Lisp. Careful readers of this book can expect to come away with an appreciation of the major questions and techniques of AI, an understanding of some important AI programs, and an ability to read, modify, and create programs using Common Lisp. The examples in this book are designed to be clear examples of good programming style-paradigms of programming. They are also paradigms of AI research-historically significant programs that use widely applicable techniques to solve important problems.

Just as a liberal arts education includes a course in "the great books" of a culture, so this book is, at one level, a course in "the great programs" that define the AI culture.[1]

At another level, this book is a highly technical compendium of the knowledge you will need to progress from being an intermediate Lisp programmer to being an expert. Parts I and II are designed to help the novice get up to speed, but the complete beginner may have a hard time even with this material. Fortunately, there are at least five good texts available for the beginner; see page xiii for my recommendations.

All too often, the teaching of computer programming consists of explaining the syntax of the chosen language, showing the student a 10-line program, and then asking the student to write programs. In this book, we take the approach that the best way to learn to write is to read (and conversely, a good way to improve reading skills is to write). After the briefest of introductions to Lisp, we start right off with complex programs and ask the reader to understand and make small modifications to these programs.

The premise of this book is that you can only write something useful and interesting when you both understand what makes good writing and have something interesting to say. This holds for writing programs as well as writing prose. As Kernighan and Plauger put it on the cover of Software Tools in Pascal:

Good programming is not learned from generalities, but by seeing how significant programs can be made clean, easy to read, easy to maintain and modify, human-engineered, efficient, and reliable, by the application of common sense and good programming practices. Careful study and imitation of good programs leads to better writing.

This book presents a body of knowledge loosely known as "AI programming techniques," but it must be recognized that there are no clear-cut boundaries on this body of knowledge. To be sure, no one can be a good AI programmer without first being a good programmer. Thus, this book presents topics (especially in parts III and V) that are not AI per se, but are essential background for any AI practitioner. Why Lisp? Why Common Lisp? Lisp is one of the oldest programming languages still in widespread use today. There have been many versions of Lisp, each sharing basic features but differing in detail. In this book we use the version called Common Lisp, which is the most widely accepted standard. Lisp has been chosen for three reasons.

First, Lisp is the most popular language for AI programming, particularly in the United States. If you're going to learn a language, it might as well be one with a growing literature, rather than a dead tongue.

Second, Lisp makes it easy to define new languages especially targeted to the problem at hand. This is especially handy in AI applications, which often manipulate complex information that is most easily represented in a novel form. Lisp is one of the few languages that allow full flexibility in defining and manipulating programs as well as data. All programming languages, by definition, provide a means of defining programs, but many other languages limit the ways in which a program can be used, or limit the range of programs that can be defined, or require the programmer to explicitly state irrelevant details.

Third, Lisp makes it very easy to develop a working program fast. Lisp programs are concise and are uncluttered by low-level detail. Common Lisp offers an unusually large number of predefined objects, including over 700 functions. The programming environment (such as debugging tools, incremental compilers, integrated editors, and interfaces to window systems) that surround Lisp systems are usually very good. And the dynamic, interactive nature of Lisp makes it easy to experiment and change a program while it is being developed.

It must be mentioned that in Europe and Japan, Prolog has been as popular as Lisp for AI work. Prolog shares most of Lisp's advantages in terms of flexibility and conciseness. Recently, Lisp has gained popularity worldwide, and Prolog is becoming more well known in the United States. As a result, the average AI worker today is likely to be bilingual. This book presents the key ideas behind Prolog in chapters 11 and 12, and uses these ideas in subsequent chapters, particularly 20 and 21.

The dialect of Lisp known as Scheme is also gaining popularity, but primarily for teaching and experimenting with programming language design and techniques, and not so much for writing large AI programs. Scheme is presented in chapters 22 and 23. Other dialects of Lisp such as Franz Lisp, MacLisp, InterLisp, ZetaLisp and Standard Lisp are now considered obsolete. The only new dialect of Lisp to be proposed recently is EuLisp, the European Lisp. A few dialects of Lisp live on as embedded extension languages. For example, the Gnu Emacs text editor uses elisp, and the AutoCad computer-aided design package uses AutoLisp, a derivative of Xlisp. In the future, it is likely that Scheme will become a popular extension language, since it is small but powerful and has an officially sanctioned standard definition.

There is a myth that Lisp (and Prolog) are "special-purpose" languages, while languages such as Pascal and C are "general purpose". Actually, just the reverse is true. Pascal and C are special-purpose languages for manipulating the registers and memory of a von Neumann-style computer. The majority of their syntax is devoted to arithmetic and Boolean expressions, and while they provide some facilities for forming data structures, they have poor mechanisms for procedural abstraction or control abstraction. In addition, they are designed for the state-oriented style of programming: computing a result by changing the value of variable through assignment statements.

Lisp, on the other hand, has no special syntax for arithmetic. Addition and multiplication are no more or less basic than list operations like appending, or string operations like converting to upper case. But Lisp provides all you will need for programming in general: defining data structures, functions, and the means for combining them.

The assignment-dominated, state-oriented style of programming is possible in Lisp, but in addition object-oriented, rule-based and functional styles are all supported within Lisp. This flexibility derives from two key features of Lisp: First, Lisp has a powerful macro facility, which can be used to extend the basic language. When new styles of programming were invented, other languages died out; Lisp simply incorporated the new styles by defining some new macros. The macro facility is possible because Lisp programs are composed of a simple data structure: the list. In the early days, when Lisp was interpreted, most manipulation of programs was done through this data structure. Nowadays, Lisp is more often compiled than interpreted, and programmers rely more on Lisp's second great flexible feature: the function. Of course, other languages have functions, but Lisp is rare in allowing the creation of new functions while a program is running.

Lisp's flexibility allows it to adapt as programming styles change, but more importantly, Lisp can adapt to your particular programming problem. In other languages you fit your problem to the language; with Lisp you extend the language to fit your problem.

Because of its flexibility, Lisp has been successful as a high-level language for rapid prototyping in such areas as AI, graphics, and user interfaces. Lisp has also been the dominant language for exploratory programming, where the problems are so complex that no clear solution is available at the start of the project. Much of AI falls under this heading.