Logic in computer science

The topic can essentially be divided into three main areas: Logic plays a fundamental role in computer science.

The theory of computation is based on concepts defined by logicians and mathematicians such as Alonzo Church and Alan Turing.

From the beginning of the field it was realized that technology to automate logical inferences could have great potential to solve problems and draw conclusions from facts.

Ron Brachman has described first-order logic (FOL) as the metric by which all AI knowledge representation formalisms should be evaluated.

Rather than arbitrary formulas with the full range of logical operators the starting point is simply what logicians refer to as modus ponens.

As a result, rule-based systems can support high-performance computation, especially if they take advantage of optimization algorithms and compilation.

An example of such a domain is Very Large Scale Integrated (VLSI) design—the process for designing the chips used for the CPUs and other critical components of digital devices.

[11] Another important application of logic to computer technology has been in the area of frame languages and automatic classifiers.

This allows specialized theorem provers called classifiers to analyze the various declarations between sets, subsets, and relations in a given model.