It sounds like you are trying to write your own version of findall/3, perhaps limited to a special case of an underlying goal. Doing it generally (constructing a list of all solutions to a given goal) in a user-defined Prolog predicate is not possible without resorting to side-effects with assert/retract.
However a number of useful special cases can be implemented without such "tricks". So it would be helpful to know what predicate defines your "all possible elements". [It may also be helpful to state which Prolog implementation you are using, if only so that responses may include links to documentation for that version.]
One important special case is where the "universe" of potential candidates already exists as a list. In that case we are really asking to find the sublist of "all possible elements" that satisfy a particular goal.
findSublist([ ],_,[ ]).
findSublist([H|T],Goal,[H|S]) :-
Goal(H),
!,
findSublist(T,Goal,S).
findSublist([_|T],Goal,S) :-
findSublist(T,Goal,S).
Many Prologs will allow you to pass the name of a predicate Goal around as an "atom", but if you have a specific goal in mind, you can leave out the middle argument and just hardcode your particular condition into the middle clause of a similar implementation.
Added in response to code posted:
I think I have a glimmer of what you are trying to do. It's hard to grasp because you are not going about it in the right way. Your predicate bp/4 has a single recursive clause, variously attempted using either AND or OR syntax to relate a call to addIn/4 to a call to bp/4 itself.
Apparently you expect wrapping bp/4 around addIn/4 in this way will somehow cause addIn/4 to accumulate or iterate over its solutions. It won't. It might help you to see this if we analyze what happens to the arguments of bp/4.
You are calling the formal arguments bp(NB,C,OL,A) with simple integers bound to NB and C, with a list of integers bound to OL, and with A as an unbound "output" Answer. Note that nothing is ever done with the value NB, as it is not passed to addIn/4 and is passed unchanged to the recursive call to bp/4.
Based on the variable names used by addIn/4 and supporting predicate insert/4, my guess is that NB was intended to mean "number of bins". For one thing you set NB = 3 in your test/0 clause, and later you "hardcode" three empty lists in the third argument in calling addIn/4. Whatever Answer you get from bp/4 comes from what addIn/4 is able to do with its first two arguments passed in, C and OL, from bp/4. As we noted, C is an integer and OL a list of integers (at least in the way test/0 calls bp/4).
So let's try to state just what addIn/4 is supposed to do with those arguments. Superficially addIn/4 seems to be structured for self-recursion in a sensible way. Its first clause is a simple termination condition that when the second argument becomes an empty list, unify the third and fourth arguments and that gives "answer" A to its caller.
The second clause for addIn/4 seems to coordinate with that approach. As written it takes the "head" Element off the list in the second argument and tries to find a "bin" in the third argument that Element can be inserted into while keeping the sum of that bin under the "cap" given by C. If everything goes well, eventually all the numbers from OL get assigned to a bin, all the bins have totals under the cap C, and the answer A gets passed back to the caller. The way addIn/4 is written leaves a lot of room for improvement just in basic clarity, but it may be doing what you need it to do.
Which brings us back to the question of how you should collect the answers produced by addIn/4. Perhaps you are happy to print them out one at a time. Perhaps you meant to collect all the solutions produced by addIn/4 into a single list. To finish up the exercise I'll need you to clarify what you really want to do with the Answers from addIn/4.
Let's say you want to print them all out and then stop, with a special case being to print nothing if the arguments being passed in don't allow a solution. Then you'd probably want something of this nature:
newtest :-
addIn(12,[7, 3, 5, 4, 6, 4, 5, 2], Answer),
format("Answer = ~w\n",[Answer]),
fail.
newtest.
This is a standard way of getting predicate addIn/4 to try all possible solutions, and then stop with the "fall-through" success of the second clause of newtest/0.
(Added) Suggestions about coding addIn/4:
- It will make the code more readable and maintainable if the variable names are clear. I'd suggest using Cap instead of C as the first argument to addIn/4 and BinSum when you take the sum of items assigned to a "bin". Likewise Bin would be better where you used Members. In the third argument to addIn/4 (in the head of the second clause) you don't need an explicit list structure [F|R] since you never refer to either part F or R by itself. So there I'd use Bins.
- Some of your predicate calls don't accomplish much that you cannot do more easily. For example, your second call to sumlist/2 involves a list with one item. Thus the sum is just the same as that item, i.e. ElementLength is the same as Element. Here you could just replace both calls to sumlist/2 with one such call:
sumlist([Element|Bin],BinSum)
and then do your test comparing BinSum with Cap. Similarly your call to append/3 just adjoins the single item Element to the front of the list (I'm calling) Bin, so you could just replace what you have called New with [Element|Bin].
- You have used an extra pair of parentheses around the last four subgoals (in the second clause for addIn/4). Since AND is implied for all the subgoals of this clause, using the extra pair of parentheses is unnecessary.
- The code for insert/4 isn't shown now, but it could be a source of some unintended "backtracking" in special cases. The better approach would be to have the first call (currently to member/2) be your only point of indeterminacy, i.e. when you choose one of the bins, do it by replacing it with a free variable that gets unified with [Element|Bin] at the next to last step.
