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Date:Mon Oct 14 15:19:41 2000 
Subject:Re: poplog flex (and HipWorks) 
From:Aaron Sloman See text for reply address 
Volume-ID:1001014.03 

[To reply replace "Aaron.Sloman.XX" with "A.Sloman"]

John wrote :-
>Can anyone tell me if Poplog Flex available under the Free poplog scheme ?

I suspect that Flex cannot be made available as it remains a commercial
(prolog-based) product, owned by LPA:

> http://www.lpa.co.uk          email: clive@lpa.co.uk
> LPA, Studio 4, RVPB, Trinity Rd, London, SW18 3SX, UK
> Tel: 0181 871 2016 (UK)       Tel: 028 36240 (Ireland)

On the other hand, there is always Poprulebase, a forward chaining
production system interpreter, implemented in Pop-11, which runs in
Poplog, is free of charge, open source, and can if necessary invoke
prolog in its conditions or its actions, since they can invoke
arbtrary pop-11. It is the core of the sim_agent toolkit.

(It doesn't (yet) have the "English-like" syntax option of Flex. However
the procedures for reading in conditions and actions are user-definable,
so you can change the syntax as long as the procedures return
appropriate lists).

A "noddy" introduction to rule-based programming and Poprulebase is
in this file, with some examples.
    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/prb/teach/rulebase

A more elaborate introduction is in
    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/prb/teach/poprulebase

A systematic overview of the core facilities is in

    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/prb/help/poprulebase

and other files in the same directory. (I have not yet had time
to construct REF files.)

Examples giving planning mechanisms, including the use of meta-rules
(i.e. a rule that gets some of its conditions from the database) can be
found here:
    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/prb/teach/prbriver

A history of changes can be found in
    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/prb/help/prb_news

The whole package is available in
    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/prb.tar.gz

or as part of the whole sim_agent toolkit
    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/newkit.tar.gz

The toolkit enables multiple interacting agents to have their own
rulesystems running "concurrently".

Poprulebase can be used together with the graphical tools in RCLIB
(e.g. control panels for asynchronous control) described in:
    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/rclib/help/rclib

(This does not require motif,and does not use propsheet.)


All the above are available from the Free Poplog Site
    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/freepoplog.html

And at this site (which may have slightly older versions of
Birmingham packages, but has other goodies):
    http://www.poplog.org

Comments, criticisms, suggestions welcome.

Steve wrote:
> Good question!  And what about HiPworks, while we are on the subject of
> what got released and what didn't?

HiPworks was developed collaboratively by Sussex and ISL in a
separate project from Poplog. I don't know if it was part of the
agreement between Sussex and SPSS to make poplog freely available
to both.

Maybe someone from ISL/SPSS or Sussex can comment?

Aaron
===
Aaron Sloman, ( http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/ )
School of Computer Science, The University of Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK
EMAIL A.Sloman AT cs.bham.ac.uk   (ReadATas@please !)
PAPERS: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/cogaff/
FREE TOOLS: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/freepoplog.html