Book Reviews

Basic Books Ad In the introduction to this anthology, Boden defines the philosophy of AI broadly "as the science of intelligence in general--or, more accurately, as the intellectual core of cognitive science." Through this comprehensive definition, she embraces the definitional extremes, including those that traditionally view AI "as the study of how to build and/or program computers to enable them to do the sorts of things that minds can do" and those that make no reference to the computer at all. This collection, however, focuses on the philosophical problems associated with the machine metaphor and asks whether machine intelligence is possible. For those already familiar with the literature, this volume provides a handy compendium. For students, it provides a concise overview of the machine intelligence debate.