Are there any programming languages designed to define the solution to a given problem instead of defining instructions to solve it? So, one would define what the solution or end result should look like and the language interpreter would determine how to arrive at that result. Looking at the list of programming languages, I'm not sure how to even begin to research this.
The best examples I can currently think of to help illustrate what I'm trying to ask are SQL and MapReduce, although those are both sort of mini-languages designed to retrieve data. But, when writing SQL or MapReduce statements, you're defining the end result, and the DB decides the best course of action to arrive at the end result set.
I could see these types of languages, if they exist, being used in crunching a lot of data or finding solutions to a set of equations. The dream language would be one that could interpret the defined problem, identify which parts are parallelizable, and execute the solution across multiple processes/cores/boxes.
What about Declarative Programming? Excerpt from wikipedia article (emphasis added):
In computer science, declarative programming is a programming paradigm that expresses the logic of a computation without describing its control flow. Many languages applying this style attempt to minimize or eliminate side effects by describing what the program should accomplish, rather than describing how to go about accomplishing it. This is in contrast with imperative programming, which requires an explicitly provided algorithm.