negation as failure

Terms from Artificial Intelligence: humans at the heart of algorithms

Page numbers are for draft copy at present; they will be replaced with correct numbers when final book is formatted. Chapter numbers are correct and will not change now.

Some implemetations of logic, notably Prolog apply negation as failure, whuch means that if a solution is not found (failure), the thing you are trying to solve is deemed as not true (negation). This effectvely adopts the closed world assumption - if raw facts are not explciitly stated they are false, or in other words all facts are known in the knowledge base.

Used on Chap. 2: page 22; Chap. 17: page 396