When a rule causes the conflict

The author.add_rule call below needs the MCP server’s --tools all profile.

Suppose we interpret the name James used by Watson’s wife as referring to Watson, while the part I title names John as his first name. Those two notes can coexist. Now imagine a rule saying the name she uses must be his first name. This is a deliberately questionable rule: a person might use a nickname.

The authoring tool renders that rule as:

rule wife-name-is-first-name ratified d-0006
  first-name($person, $name) :- name-used-by-wife($person, $name)

The variables $person and $name stand for a person and a name. The rule uses this recorded fact:

watson.name-used-by-wife = james ratified d-0003

The check follows the rule and reports:

continuity.derived-fd-violation: the evaluated world derives a functional-dependency break on 'first-name': watson carries 2 distinct certain values [james, john] once rules fire
citations: d-0001, d-0003, d-0006

d-0001 and d-0003 identify the two story sources, and d-0006 identifies our rule. The conflict did not require us to type the James first-name claim: it followed from the rule and the note. In a real project, the right repair might be to change the rule rather than change either source.

Run it yourself

From the repository root, with deloreis installed, run:

python3 examples/holmes/try_casebook.py rule

This replays the casebook in a temporary project and prints:

continuity.derived-fd-violation
supporting decisions: d-0001, d-0003, d-0006

[
  {
    "tool": "author.add_rule",
    "arguments": {
      "workspace": "ws-3",
      "name": "wife-name-is-first-name",
      "head": {
        "pred": "first-name",
        "args": [
          {
            "Var": "person"
          },
          {
            "Var": "name"
          }
        ]
      },
      "body": [
        {
          "atom": {
            "pred": "name-used-by-wife",
            "args": [
              {
                "Var": "person"
              },
              {
                "Var": "name"
              }
            ]
          },
          "negated": false
        }
      ],
      "provenance": {
        "kind": "cited",
        "decisions": [
          "d-0006"
        ],
        "state": "ratified"
      }
    }
  },
  {
    "tool": "author.check",
    "arguments": {
      "workspace": "ws-3"
    }
  }
]