Logic Programming for Interactive Fiction
As a teaser-trailer to the ideas I have been long overdue to write up, allow me to play some silly games with words. All claims herein are nontechnical and unsubstantiated. PL theorists are fond of the snowclone X-as-Y, "props-as-types" and "proofs-as-programs" being the pervasive example in functional programming. When we similarly try to explain logic programming logically , what comes out is more like "props as programs" and "proofs as traces ". Put another way, in functional progamming, computation is proof reduction while in logic programming, computation is proof search . So, then, what is a game? (I mean in the sense of "something humans play for fun," and specifically "as a piece of software", not the game-theory sense.*) At a rough gloss, a game is an interactive program. An execution of a game alternates computation and accepting human input. Interactive fiction is a minimal distillation of the idea (in that it...