Modeling Scienti c Theories as PRISM Programs

PRISM is a new type of symbolic-statistical modeling language which integrates logic programming and learning seamlessly 2 . It is designed for the symbolic-statistical modeling of complex phenomena such as genetics and economics where logical/social rules and uncertainty interact, thus expected to be a valuable tool for scienti c discovery. In this paper, we rst give a detailed account of PRISM at propositional logic level. Then we concentrate, instead of looking over various elds, on one subject, the inheritance mechanism of blood types. We show with experimental results that various theories of blood type inheritance are described as PRISM programs. Finally we suggest possible extensions of PRISM. The reader is assumed to be familiar with logic programming [8].