Customer Reviews

Artificial Intelligence (3rd Edition)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Suppose you are, like me, a software engineer who never actually studied CS beyond junior level undergraduate 'data structures'... and now you have to work on something involving complicated pattern matching... this is how to do it: buy this book and Sipser's on the Theory of Computation. After digesting them (which is easy if you're as good with logical mathematics as the typical software engineer), you should be able to read current literature in either field, and will have a deep, fundamental understanding of how to best solve whatever problem you're working on. That's what worked for me, anyway. An excellent book, as is Sipser's.

Having purchased this book as a supplement to Winston's course at MIT, I can very highly recommend it as a very comprehensive, up-to-date, well written text summarizing the field. The book covers essentially all of the topics pertenant in modern AI with enough detail for a complete implementation without being overly technical. I strongly recommend it to anybody looking to build intelligent systems or to anybody simply perusing the field for abstract ideas.

This book serves as an excellent introduction to what is in reality a very broad topic. Not meant for serious research into any one particular area of AI, the text is excellent for undergraduates(with questions that aren't worded too badly - a rarity in AI texts). More advanced AI topics are given short shrift(as is typical), but are covered in sufficient depth to give students an idea of how they work(three chapters worth if I'm not mistaken, more than most texts).

This is a good supplement to "AI - A Modern Approach by Russell and Norvig". The students and myself found the examples and illustration to be of great value in the understanding of the concepts. Would be great if authors could links references on the web for more information. Good book for the delivery of AI at foundation level.

Winston's book is really terrible. I mean truly repellently, malignantly bad. "Can it really be as bad as all that?" you wonder. Yes!! It's that bad!! For starters, the book is poorly organized. Topics that logically belong together are often several chapters apart. There is no overall structure to the book. It seems like a collection of topics in AI that were hastily assembled without concern for thematic organization or flow. For example, the forward and backward chaining algorithms are presented in a chapter (Ch. 7) on rule-based systems, but are not even mentioned in the chapter (Ch. 13) on logic! Perceptron training is presented AFTER backpropagation! Contrast this with the much better book by Russell and Norvig, which uses the theme of intelligent agents as a continuing motivation throughout, and which groups related topics into logically arranged chapters.

The examples in Winston are atrocious. The main example in the backpropagation chapter is some kind of classification network with a bizarre topography. This example is so trivial and weird that it totally fails to illustrate the strengths of backpropagation. The explanations of generalization and overfitting in backprop training are awful.

The only chapter of this book that is not an unmitigated pedagogical disaster is the chapter on genetic algorithms, although better introductions exist (e.g. Melanie Mitchell).

A further annoyance is the placement of all the exercises at the end of the book instead of the end of the chapters to which they correspond.

Avoid this book. It is truly horrible, and vastly superior books on AI are readily available at comparable prices.

My business used this book to help us rethink our analysis of credit and prepaid card fraud. While the material itself has been around for some time, it helped us develop new methods of detecting potential fraud.

It's too bad that MIT OCW doesn't have a series of video lectures to accompany this textbook. But then again, if the textbook is good enough, it won't need lectures.

This book is bad (period). It is very incoherent and ill-organized. The examples are vague and serve anything but support the material. Very theoritical with hardly any real life applications. Lacking in modern AI topics/game design.

In a phrase: as nauseating as the "artwork" which besmirches its cover. This book is definitely not worth the price. Donate the money instead to your city's homeless instead! You will learn as much about AI by doing so and will actually contribute something to the world. Of course, the cover makes a great prank at cocktail parties. Place it under someone's drink and it will look like the beverage has been spilled.

Winston's book is not only disorganized, but pretentious. He writes about the mind as if he has the authority of a philosopher of mind, when, in fact, he's just a programmer. Winston and his books will go down in history with the works of others, such as Doug Lenat, who made their fame primarily by doing something very easy before anyone else got around to doing it.

Real AI is yet to come.

I think this book is waste of money, at least for the students, who want to study the topic "STRIPS" in the AI field. Unfortunately our textbook in the university is this one, so we read and depend on other AI books, from the libraries.