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Artificial Intelligence: A New Synthesis (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Artificial Intelligence)
Nils J. Nilsson Manufacturer: Morgan Kaufmann ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover  General
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ASIN: 1558604677 |
Book Description
Intelligent agents are employed as the central characters in this new introductory text. Beginning with elementary reactive agents, Nilsson gradually increases their cognitive horsepower to illustrate the most important and lasting ideas in AI. Neural networks, genetic programming, computer vision, heuristic search, knowledge representation and reasoning, Bayes networks, planning, and language understanding are each revealed through the growing capabilities of these agents. The book provides a refreshing and motivating new synthesis of the field by one of AI's master expositors and leading researchers. Artificial Intelligence: A New Synthesis takes the reader on a complete tour of this intriguing new world of AI.
* An evolutionary approach provides a unifying theme
* Thorough coverage of important AI ideas, old and new
* Frequent use of examples and illustrative diagrams
* Extensive coverage of machine learning methods throughout the text
* Citations to over 500 references
* Comprehensive index
Customer Reviews:
Good general overview.......2004-07-05
This book is written more in the context of the latter camp, than in the former. However, in-depth discussion of the Turing test is not given, and this actually is one of the main virtues of the book, although the author clearly believes that the purpose of doing research in artificial intelligence is to achieve human-level intelligence. As he remarks in the last paragraph in the book, it was written to overview the techniques that he believes are required to achieve human-level intelligence. Although he does not explicitly give the reader tests for machine intelligence that will allow progress to be measured, he devotes a small portion of the book to various ideas on just what constitutes intelligence.
The book also gives a general (and sometimes very brief) overview of the algorithms used in artificial intelligence. Search heuristics, neural networks, and genetic programming are some of the topics that are covered. The influence of the "intelligent agent" paradigm, that is now taking the AI community by storm, is very apparent throughout the book. The author though does not neglect some of the topics in "good-ole-fashioned" artificial intelligence that arose decades ago and is still applicable today, especially in the field of logic programming. These topics include resolution in both the propositional and predicate calculus, and in expert systems. By far the best discussion in the book is on knowledge-based systems and evolving knowledge bases. This topic has taken on considerable importance in recent years due to the importance of data mining and business intelligence.
Readers who are considering artificial intelligence as a career choice will find good motivation by reading this book. The field also is quite different than most others in that it respects a high degree of individual creativity and ingenuity, and has a high bandwidth for new ideas. Beginning with its origins in the 1950s, the field has grown by leaps and bounds, but its applications have exploded in the last five years, fueled mainly by business and financial applications. Concerned not only with achieving human-level capabilities, but also with other forms of intelligence and how they can be useful, artificial intelligence has become one of the predominant forces in the twenty-first century. One can only be excited and optimistic about its further advances.
Run Forrest Run.......2003-02-23
Not a good intro to AI.......2002-12-19
nice, but with these errors.......2002-11-27
Page 52: The "high-degree function" is not a function!
Page 92: In Figure 6.6, the topmost pixels that get deleted as a result of the averaging operation should actually remain there, since both their sums are 4, which is greater than the threshold, which is 3.
Page 100: In Fig. 6.13, the last row of the last image contains a spurious image boundary.
Page 151: In Fig. 9.8, there are two nodes with name n; the one which is higher in the figure should have the subscript 1.
Page 152, item 3 in the list: There is an implicit assumption that h-hat always returns 0 for goal states. I don't think that this assumption is stated earlier in the text.
Page 165: In Figure 10.1, all arrows are supposed to be pointing away from the current state.
Page 246: The last paragraph mentions ".. the two interpretations for Clear and On suggested by Fig. 15.2", but aren't actually THREE interpretations suggested for On?
And in the current errata list in the book's website, something is clearly wrong with item 6, since it says n_i should be replaced by n_i.
All in all, a good book.
Varies between being superficial and incomprehendable.......2002-10-26
The book covers all the major areas of artificial intelligence but does so in a very superficial manner. There isn't actually enough information in the book at allow to to implement some of the techniques available - it is mostly teasers. Also many of the subjects are - and even some of the subjects that I already knew about beforehand - incomprehendable and I often got more confused about a subject than before I began reading it.
I very rarely give a book one star, but this one deserves it in the light of the many better books on AI. I recommend that you read "Russell and Norvig: Artificial Intelligence - A Modern Approach" instead.
Jacob Marner, M.Sc.
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