Organized by The Association for Logic Programming
Prize History
In the summer of 1972, Alain Colmerauer and his team in Marseille developed and implemented the first version of the logic programming language Prolog. Together with both earlier and later collaborations with Robert Kowalski and his colleagues in Edinburgh, this work laid the practical and theoretical foundations for the Prolog and logic programming of today. Prolog and its related technologies soon became key tools of symbolic programming and Artificial Intelligence.
2022 was celebrated as the Year of Prolog to recognize the 50th anniversary of these events and highlight the continuing significance of Prolog and Logic Programming both for symbolic, explainable AI, and for computing more generally. The celebration inaugurated the ALP Alain Colmerauer Prolog Heritage Prize (in short: the Alain Colmerauer Prize). The Alain Colmerauer Prize and the Year of Prolog were organized by the Association for Logic Programming (ALP) and the Prolog Heritage Association (PHA).
The Prize is given for recent accomplishments and practical advances in Prolog-inspired computing, understood in a broad sense, where foundational, technological, and practical contributions are eligible with proven evidence or potential for the future development of Logic Programming.
AC Prize Edition Winners
- Edition 2025 — Jan Wielemaker: For the development and evolution of the SWI-Prolog system, which is used as the platform for a broad variety of different and innovative recent applications of Prolog to address real-world challenges
- Edition 2024 — Alan Gatherer, Chaitali Sengupta, Sudipta Sen, Tim Hoffman; for Prolog as a Basis for RDSL: A Domain Specific Language for 5G/6G Radio Access Networks
- Edition 2023 — Theresa Swift and Carl Andersen; for Showcasing the relevance of modern Prolog’s reasoning capabilities to contemporary imperative languages and contributing to making Prolog accessible to the wider AI community
- Edition 2022 — Michael Leuschel and STUPS Group; for ProB: Harnessing the Power of Prolog to Bring Formal Models and Mathematics to Life