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Since logic programs are executable specifications, the main concern of logic programming, producing efficient programs, is tangential to the mainstream of formal methods. A fashionable automatic transformation technique for producing efficient programs, partial evaluation, applied to the concurrent logic programming language Parlog is discussed.

The concurrent logic languages, of which Parlog is one, have been promoted as a new generation of software languages specifically designed for parallel programming. This paper investigates their apphcation to a search problem commonly used as an illustration of artificial intelligence techniques, the 8-puzzle. It notes that programs written in the concurrent logic languages which do not pay attention to the parallehsm can fall into two possible traps: either there is little real parallelism in them due to data dependencies, or there is too much parallelism and any practical architecture will be overwhelmed. A solution which controls the parallehsm using user-defined priorities is proposed. This solution has the advantage of being architecture-independent.

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