A.I. in .NET
During the great MSDN Tour in Ecuador, one of the most interesting questions I got was made by a couple of students who, as part of their final work, needed to use/port A.I. algorithms to .NET. Scrambling for an answer I pointed them to Mondrian, but Mondrian is a functional language, a programming paradigm with deep roots in LISP but that leans more towards maths than to A.I. I also mentioned Mercury, and that was a better shot, because Mercury is a logic programming language (รก la Prolog), Mercury is in beta but it may well be enough for their needs. Another possibility is DotLisp, a LISP dialect for .NET scripting, also in beta. Moving forward, we have P# which is a Prolog compiler that generates C#. Finally, a fascinating detail is the fact that the .NET Framework 1.1 includes a LISP mini-compiler here, the compiler is written in C# and generates MSIL, so it could be a good starting point for the translation of the algorithms. All in all, A.I. in .NET is possible but it is clearly in an early stage, which makes it a hot topic for a final paper.