Artificial Intelligence -- A Modern Approach A Review

The eight sections are (1) Artificial Intelligence (introductory material); (2) Problem-Solving (search and game playing); (3) Knowledge and Reasoning (propositional and predicate logic, inference techniques, knowledge representation); (4) Acting Logically (planning); (5) Uncertain Knowledge and Reasoning (probabilistic reasoning, Bayesian nets, decision-theoretic techniques); (6) Learning (inductive learning, neural nets, reinforcement learning); (7) Communicating, Perceiving, and Acting (natural language processing, computer vision, robotics); and (8) Conclusions (philosophical foundations and summary). What makes this textbook so good? First, it is remarkably comprehensive. In the preface, the authors suggest several alternative paths through the book that could serve as the basis of a one-semester course. At the University of Pittsburgh, my colleagues and I cover roughly the first half of the book (Sections 1-4) in the firstsemester introductory graduate AI course, covering most of Sections 5 through 8 in a second-semester course.