Textbooks & Overview Sections from Textbooks

Some Widely-Used Teaching Texts

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Luger: Artificial Intelligence: Structures and Strategies for Complex Problem Solving,

5th Edition. A textbook by George F. Luger. 2005. Addison-Wesley. Several sections are available online.

• Preface: "Although artificial intelligence, like most engineering disciplines, must justify itself to the world of commerce by providing solutions to practical problems, we entered the field of AI for the same reasons as many of our colleagues and students: we want to understand and explore the mechanisms of mind that enable intelligent thought and action. We reject the rather provincial notion that intelligence is an exclusive ability of humans, and believe that we can effectively investigate the space of possible intelligences by designing and evaluating intelligent artifacts. Although the course of our careers has given us no cause to change these commitments, we have arrived at a greater appreciation for the scope, complexity, and audacity of this undertaking."
• Chapter One, AI: Early History and Applications: "Mary Shelley shows us the extent to which scientific advances such as the work of Darwin and the discovery of electricity had convinced even nonscientists that the workings of nature were not divine secrets, but could be broken down and understood systematically. Frankenstein's monster is not the product of shamanistic incantations or unspeakable transactions with the underworld: it is assembled from separately 'manufactured' components and infused with the vital force of electricity. Although nineteenth-century science was inadequate to realize the goal of understanding and creating a fully intelligent agent, it affirmed the notion that the mysteries of life and intellect might be brought into the light of scientific analysis."

Poole & Macworth:

Artificial Intelligence: Foundations of Computational Agents. Cambridge University Press, 2010. The whole book is available online in html, and the hard copy is available from your favourite bookstore. We have a number of associated interactive learning tools in AIspace and some open-source interactive demos. "It presents artificial intelligence as the study of the design of intelligent computational agents. The book is structured as a textbook, but it is accessible to a wide audience of professionals and researchers. In the last decades we have witnessed the emergence of artificial intelligence as a serious science and engineering discipline. This book provides the first accessible synthesis of the field aimed at undergraduate and graduate students. It provides a coherent vision of the foundations of the field as it is today. It aims to provide that synthesis as an integrated science, in terms of a multi-dimensional design space that has been partially explored. As with any science worth its salt, artificial intelligence has a coherent, formal theory and a rambunctious experimental wing. The book balances theory and experiment, showing how to link them intimately together. It develops the science of AI together with its engineering applications. "

Poole, Mackworth & Goebel:

Computational Intelligence - A Logical Approach. By David Poole, Alan Mackworth and Randy Goebel. 1998. Oxford University Press, New York. "Our theory is based on logic. Logic has been developed over the centuries as a formal (that is, precise not obtuse) way of representing assumptions about a world and the process of deriving the consequences of those assumptions. For simple agents in simple worlds we start with a highly restricted simple logic. Then as our agent/environment requires, we increase the logical power of the formalism. Since a computer is simply a symbol-manipulation engine, we can easily map our formal theories into computer programs that can control an agent or be used to reason about an agent. Everything we describe is implemented that way." - From the Preface, which is available online.

• Chapter 1 is also available online and addresses questions such as:
  • "What is Computational Intelligence? Computational intelligence is the study of the design of intelligent agents. An agent is something that acts in an environment -- it does something. ... The central scientific goal of computational intelligence is to understand the principles that make intelligent behavior possible, in natural or artificial systems. The main hypothesis is that reasoning is computation. The central engineering goal is to specify methods for the design of useful, intelligent artifacts. ..."
  • "Artificial or Computational Intelligence? Artificial intelligence (AI) is the established name for the field we have defined as computational intelligence (CI), but the term 'artificial intelligence' is a source of much confusion. Is artificial intelligence real intelligence? Perhaps not, just as an artificial pearl is a fake pearl, not a real pearl. 'Synthetic intelligence' might be a better name, since, after all, a synthetic pearl may not be a natural pearl but it is a real pearl. However, since we claimed that the central scientific goal is to understand both natural and artificial (or synthetic) systems, we prefer the name 'computational intelligence.' It also has the advantage of making the computational hypothesis explicit in the name. ..."

Russell & Norvig:

Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (Second Edition). A textbook by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig. 2002. Prentice Hall. The Preface and several chapters are available online, as is their collection of AI Resources on the Web.

Available from a library, the publisher, or Amazon: