Reason to learn propositional & predicate logic

Answered By : Guy Coder

I tend to like Unification and anything related to it. If you don't know propositional & predicate logic, then you are skipping the basics of logic. If you have an interest in anything listed, then it would be like having an interest in math and skipping addition and multiplication. Logic is not just for AI.

As a practical answer, remember the Intel floating point problem and how you never see them anymore? Thanks to the use of theorem provers they are a thing of the past. Remember the Microsoft blue screen of death. Thanks to SAT solvers, model checking and other logic based solution, they are an endangered species.

Problem Detail: 

I can understand the importance that computer scientists or any software development related engineers should have understood the study of basic logics as a basis.

But is there any tasks/jobs that explicitly require the knowledge about these, other than the tasks that require any kind of knowledge representation using Knowledge Base? I want to hear the types of tasks, rather than conceptual responses.

The reason I ask this is just from my curiosity. While CS students have to spend certain amount of time on this subject, some practicality-intensive courses (e.g. AI-Class) skipped this topic entirely. And I just wonder that for example knowing predicate logic might help drawing ER diagram but might not be a requirement.

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Update 5/27/2012) Thanks for answers. Now I think I totally understand & agree with the importance of logicin CS with its vast amount of application. I just picked the best answer truly from the impressiveness that I got by the solution for Windows' blue screen issue.

Asked By : IsaacS

Best Answer from StackOverflow

Question Source : http://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/1636