[om-list] Oz: A new, general-purpose, high-level, very distributed, multiparadigm AI programming language

[Thomas L. Packer at home]

Oz: A new, general-purpose, high-level, very distributed, multiparadigm AI programming language

Hello OM People

    Dr. Geary, BYU's one NLP professor, has introduced me to a very interesting programming language called Oz which is programmed in an environment called Mozart.

http://www.mozart-oz.org/

    From what I understand so far, it seems to be a very well done mixture of all the useful, high-level programming paradigms you can think of:
  a..     functional-applicative (lisp and scheme), 
  b..     object oriented programming (Java, C++),
  c..     logic programming (prolog),
  d..     and a new area of higher-level programming I am just now learning about in AI called concurrent constraint programming
    This looks like a good place to start in trying to understand what the language is:

http://www.mozart-oz.org/documentation/tutorial/index.html
http://www.mozart-oz.org/documentation/tutorial/node1.html#chapter.introduction

    For an overview of the technical papers written around the subject of this new (10-year-old) language, click on each of the links in this page:

http://www.mozart-oz.org/papers/

    I think Mark Butler might be interested in this because I bet you could frame the problem of matching people information (as in genealogical searching or merging of files) in terms of constraints, and this language sounds like the right language in which to do that kind of programming.  You can also write your own constraints in C++ and use them inside an Oz program.

    Here is a nice little introduction taken from the list of papers in the previous link:

http://www.mozart-oz.org/papers/abstracts/ACM_Surveys_96.html

    Let me know what you think.  

    This may be a more practical, and more general purpose, and easier language to use than Soar or Act-R which I have also considered learning and using.

    And for OM in particular, it may provide some nice features for modelling knowledge.

    And two important features of this language: it is free and open source and apparently actively being developed.

    ciao,
tomp

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Omnia apud me Mathesis fiunt.
www.Ontolog.Com

It is a paradoxical but profoundly true
and important principle of life that the
most likely way to reach a goal is to be
aiming not at that goal itself but at
some more ambitious goal beyond it.
  -- Arnold Toynbee
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://six.pairlist.net/pipermail/om-list/attachments/20040306/dd3b6a95/attachment.html