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From: vantreeck@logic.dec.com
Newsgroups: net.lang.prolog
Subject: re: flames about a DFID PROLOG question
Message-ID: <3391@decwrl.DEC.COM>
Date: Mon, 2-Jun-86 15:05:50 EDT
Article-I.D.: decwrl.3391
Posted: Mon Jun  2 15:05:50 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 4-Jun-86 07:45:48 EDT
Sender: daemon@decwrl.DEC.COM
Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation
Lines: 16


>1) The copious use of cut in PROLOG indicates that programmers are frequently
>interested in only a single, first, solution. I thought perhaps DFID might be
>a way of finding a single, first solution in very large PROLOG search spaces.
>For example, a program to synthesize new chemicals might be find DFID useful
>for finding the shortest synthesise pathway (very large branching factor in a
>very large search space). 


The last note wasn't clear about finding solutions with DFID. I didn't
mean to imply that DFID would only find one solution. DFID could easilly
backtrack and find the next most least cost solution. I just meant that
it might be a quicker way to find that first single solution in cases
cases where the search space is very large.

-George