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Comment by sprior | Hacker News Reader

I always thought it would be interesting to use the solution seeking of Prolog to design a physical object, but haven't figured out a usecase. Funny that in my house it would be possible to trigger the design of an object by a MQTT message of an event, slice that object, then turn on my 3D printer and print it with no manual intervention.

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The prolog thing sounds brilliant but I can’t quite see how it would work. Any insight?

For example: You could enter some fragile object and then let the Prolog search for best shape of box for it.

Only problem is that all (most?) Prologs suck, the realm of natural numbers is not in the search space. In this case there is also good cause to limit this realm by available printing area and accuracy.

Yeah the Prolog part would probably have to just do a yes/no analysis of whether the proposed solution is even a candidate, but then maybe something else would score the quality of the remaining candidates.

Another possibility might be using Prolog's list/object composing ability. As a fun example let's imagine that you have a Flintstone's AirBNB. You write Prolog code to capture some pieces like a weather forecast icon and a headline or two, then compose that into a design that looks like this info on a stone tablet and send it to the printer loaded with marble colored filament, then have it on the table with breakfast.

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