Re:Sega AI
by neilv on Wednesday January 31, 2024 @07:46PM
(#39211620)
Sounds like they had some kind of Prolog inferencing/runtime stored in ROM, and running on a normal early x86 CPU. Games packaged for the machine could call that runtime code, but Prolog wasn't exposed to the user. So there is the marketing aspect (that generation of "AI" hype, and government initiatives), plus whatever unusual functionality that enabled being exposed through games (e.g., simple natural language parsing).
A few years after this, a project I was loosely involved with tossed a Prolog interpreter into a much larger system that was mostly implemented in C, just to implement a reports query language feature for a complex data model. Years later, for a very similar purpose for a rich data model, we instead exposed SQL to the power user/integrator.
(Today, you'd probably do the custom reports by making a GUI forms-based or wizard-based way of doing custom queries, or overkill it with a drag&drop visual programming language. To do NLP-ish stuff this year, you'd be shot if you didn't first try to do it with an LLM.)
A few years after this, a project I was loosely involved with tossed a Prolog interpreter into a much larger system that was mostly implemented in C, just to implement a reports query language feature for a complex data model. Years later, for a very similar purpose for a rich data model, we instead exposed SQL to the power user/integrator.
(Today, you'd probably do the custom reports by making a GUI forms-based or wizard-based way of doing custom queries, or overkill it with a drag&drop visual programming language. To do NLP-ish stuff this year, you'd be shot if you didn't first try to do it with an LLM.)