Deriving Logic Programs From Observations

This paper describes a method for deriving logic programs from observations that can be made of the progress of a computation. Such observations can be regarded as extrinsic specifications, and can be represented as directed acyclic graphs. Each computation that the system can perform is represented by a path through the graph which in turn can be described in first order logic. Logic programs can be derived from these first order logic descriptions by standard transformations. In this paper we chose to derive sequential logic programs, but the method is equally applicable to concurrent systems. Introduction A logic programming system can be viewed as a black box for computing bindings. The internal workings of such a system should be invisible to an observer whose only interest in such system is its input-output behaviour. We have chosen to model information processing systems as logic programming systems during whose execution variables are bound. Our assumption is that an observer c..