I'm afraid this rule is meaningless:
gotFrom(X,Y) :- gotFrom(Y,_).
There is nothing here to constrain X or Y to any particular values. Also, the presence of singleton variable X
and the anonymous variable _
means that basically anything will work. Try it:
?- gotFrom([1,2,3], dogbert).
true ;
true ;
What I think you're trying to establish here is some kind of transitive property. In that case, what you want is probably more like this:
gotFrom(X,Z) :- gotFrom(X, Y), gotFrom(Y, Z).
This produces an interesting result:
?- gotFrom(brock, Who).
Who = cara ;
Who = daniel ;
Who = m ;
ERROR: Out of local stack
The reason for the problem may not be immediately obvious. It's that there is unchecked recursion happening twice in that rule. We recursively unify gotFrom/2
and then we recursively unify it again. It would be better to break this into two predicates so that one of them can be used non-recursively.
got_directly_from(annie,brock).
got_directly_from(brock,cara).
got_directly_from(cara,daniel).
got_directly_from(daniel,m).
gotFrom(X,Y) :- got_directly_from(X, Y).
gotFrom(X,Z) :- got_directly_from(X, Y), gotFrom(Y, Z).
This gives us the desired behavior:
?- gotFrom(brock, Who).
Who = cara ;
Who = daniel ;
Who = m ;
false.
Notice this one is resilient to my attack of meaningless data:
?- gotFrom([1,2,3], dogbert).
false.
Some general advice:
- Never ignore singleton variable warnings. They are almost always a bug.
- Never introduce a cut when you don't understand what's going on. The cut should be used only where you understand the behavior first and you understand how the cut will affect it. Ideally, you should try to restrict yourself to green cuts—cuts that only affect performance and have no observable effects. If you don't understand what Prolog is up to, adding a red cut is just going to make your problems more complex.