Alright. Let's get this over with. You want to understand computational logic. Fine. Don't expect me to hold your hand. This is about precision, about systems, about how we force reason onto the inherently chaotic. Like trying to teach a cat to file its taxes.
Computational Logic
This whole mess is about using logic to do things, or at least to think about doing things, with computation. It’s the same way mathematical logic is to mathematics, or philosophical logic is to philosophy. It’s the cold, hard framework. Some call it "logic in computer science". A more fitting, less sentimental term.
You might also hear it linked to logic programming. That’s not entirely by accident. A lot of the early work on that, back in the 70s, was happening in a place called the Department of Computational Logic in Edinburgh. It resurfaced in the early 90s for some EU project, "Compulog." Then, a certain Krzysztof Apt decided to slap the name on the ACM Transactions on Computational Logic in 2000. Apparently, he thought it sounded grand.
The term itself didn't really hit its stride until that ACM Transactions journal showed up. But the idea? That’s older. J.A. Robinson brought it up in 1970. He described it as a better phrase than "theorem proving" for the part of artificial intelligence that’s concerned with making machines do deductions efficiently. He said it with a footnote. Because of course, he did.
Back in 1972, the Metamathematics Unit at the University of Edinburgh became "The Department of Computational Logic." Clever. Robert S. Boyer and J Strother Moore, who were doing their thing there in the early 70s, used the term to describe their work on program verification and automated reasoning. They even started a company with it: Computational Logic Inc. They understood. It's about the mechanism.
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