John McCarthy had previously suggested ( back in 1958 ) ideas about artifical intelligence from logic programming:

“Programs to manipulate in a suitable formal language (most likely a part of the predicate calculus) common instrumental statements. The basic program will draw immediate conclusions from a list of premises. These conclusions will be either declarative or imperative sentences. When an imperative sentence is deduced the program takes a corresponding action..."

“...The main advantages we expect the advice taker to have is that its behaviour will be improvable merely by making statements to it, telling it about its symbolic environment and what is wanted from it. To make these statements will require little if any knowledge of the program or the previous knowledge of the advice taker. One will be able to assume that the advice taker will have available to it a fairly wide class of immediate logical consequences of anything it is told and its previous knowledge. This property is expected to have much in common with what makes us describe certain humans as having common sense. We shall therefore say that a program has common sense if it automatically deduces for itself a sufficiently wide class of immediate consequences of anything it is told and what it already knows."

The idea of having a program with 'common sense' is essentially the drive behind modern logic programming. A program can store a collection of logical sentences, and then use them, in conjunction with observations of the surroundings, to deduce new sentences, possibly acting upon them. Work in artificial intelligence involving agents and other systems that are aware of their surroundings is made possible only through logic programming. Prolog is still widely used, although it has many higher-order (meta) functions added to it in order to help the programmer and prevent duplicate code.

Sources: Wikipedia; Chris Hogger.