eyedia

Path discovery

Find flight routes from Ostend to Prague in a network of 7,698 airports.

path-discovery.pl · output · proof · check · try it in the playground

The question

You want to fly from Ostend-Bruges to Prague, changing planes at most twice. A stopover is an airport where you change planes on the way.

Which routes are there? No airport may be visited twice.

The data is a historical snapshot of airport connections, not today’s timetable.

What we tell Eyedia: the data

The file holds 7,698 airports and 37,505 one-way connections:

airport('AIRPORT_1', 'Goroka Airport').
airport('AIRPORT_10', 'Thule Air Base').
% … 7,696 more airports …
flight('AIRPORT_1', 'AIRPORT_2').
flight('AIRPORT_1', 'AIRPORT_3').
% … 37,503 more connections …

flight(A, B) means there is a connection from A to B. That is about 1.9 MB of facts, followed by a few rules.

What we tell Eyedia: the rules

route_airports(From, To, _, Visited, [From, To]) :-
    flight(From, To), unvisited(To, Visited).
route_airports(From, To, Remaining, Visited, [From|Rest]) :-
    Remaining > 0,
    flight(From, Via), Via \= To, unvisited(Via, Visited),
    Next is Remaining-1,
    route_airports(Via, To, Next, [Via|Visited], Rest).

Either fly straight there, to an airport not yet visited;
or, if stopovers remain, fly to a new airport Via and continue from there with one stopover fewer.

path_discovery wraps this, turning names into ids and back.

What Eyedia concludes

Three routes, all through Liège:

Ostend-Bruges → Liège → Heraklion International Nikos Kazantzakis → Prague
Ostend-Bruges → Liège → Diagoras Airport → Prague
Ostend-Bruges → Liège → Palma De Mallorca → Prague

The real output lists the full names, for example: ['Ostend-Bruges International Airport', 'Liège Airport', 'Diagoras Airport', 'Václav Havel Airport Prague'].

Why: the proof in plain words

For the Heraklion route, the proof records:

Ostend-Bruges is airport 310 and Prague is airport 1587 — facts;
2 is a whole number, at least 0, and 310 is not 1587 — built-ins;
there is a flight 310 → 309 (Liège), and Liège is not yet visited;
there is a flight 309 → 1452 (Heraklion), and Heraklion is new too;
there is a flight 1452 → 1587, and Prague is new — route complete.

“Not yet visited” is shown by comparing against each earlier airport, one by one, so even that part is spelled out.

Checked, not just claimed

Out of 37,505 connections, the proof cites only the handful each route uses. It has 76 steps behind the 3 routes:

53 steps are exact instances of the program lines they cite;
23 built-in comparisons and subtractions are recomputed and agree;
nothing is circular or extra.

Verdict: checked. Nothing taken on trust: the “no repeats” rule uses explicit “is not the same as” tests rather than “cannot be shown”, so it leaves no obligations.

Try it

node bin/eyedia.js examples/path-discovery.pl
node bin/eyedia.js --goal "path_discovery('Liège Airport', 'Václav Havel Airport Prague', 1, Path)" examples/path-discovery.pl

Or open it in the playground. With 0 stopovers only direct flights count: --goal "path_discovery('Ostend-Bruges International Airport', 'Liège Airport', 0, Path)" gives the single route Ostend-Bruges → Liège.

Takeaway

Even in a large dataset, an answer’s proof stays small: it names only the flights that route uses, and every one of them can be checked against the data.

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