Book reivew: LOGIC PROGRAMMING: FUNCTIONS, RELATIONS AND EQUATIONS. Edited by Doug DeGroot and Gary Lindstrom (Prentice-Hall)

This is an advanced monograph in Combinatorics dealing with what quite often is called "Hungarian" combinatorics; hypergraphs, set systems, etc. Presently, the connections of this part of Combinatorics to Artificial Intelligence and Databases are rather loose, the only application that comes to mind are topics related to cyclic and acyclic databases. Hence we should pose to ourselves the following question: is it worth it (from the professional point of view, of course) to read such books at all and is it worth it, in particular, to review them in a specialized bulletin like SIGART news? Generally the answer to both questions is, in the opinion of this reviewer, negative. Let us point out however that the combinatorics treated in Bollobas book is very interesting and sometimes stunning in its beauty. I wish programs (like AM, Eurisco, etc.) were able to produce such estetic results. For a moment, though, we have no hope of building programs mimicking inventiveness of mathematicians and, finally I do not expect to see such programs written during my lifespan.