Installing and running Sceptic

Installing

Sceptic is a forward-chaining reasoner very similar to Prolog. In fact, it is actually written in Prolog, and so in order to run it, you will need to install SWI Prolog as described here first.

When you have done so, download the Sceptic implementation from here and unzip it in a convenient location, e.g., within the directory where you keep your Cognitive Systems work.

On Windows, you can then navigate to that directory, and double-click on "sc.pl" to launch SWI Prolog with the Sceptic interpreter.

On OS X and Linux, open a terminal window and navigate using "cd" to the directory you have just extracted. Launch the Prolog interpreter and type

[sc].

Sceptic will now load, and on all platforms, will present you with the Sceptic prompt.

Consulting a Sceptic file.

Sceptic files are given the extension ".sc". When you have created a Sceptic file using your system's text editor, you can load it into Sceptic by entering

sc_load(filename).

at the Sceptic prompt, where "filename" is the name of the file WITHOUT the ".sc" extension. So if you want to load "test.sc" from the current directory, you would enter

sc_load(test).

Quitting Sceptic

To quit the Sceptic interpreter, just use the standard Prolog halt predicate:

halt.

Documentation

The Sceptic user manual can be downloaded here in PDF format.

Exercises

Files associated with the Sceptic exercises can be downloaded here.

Any problems?

If you have any problems, don't hesitate to contact Prof. John Fox.