Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (3rd Edition) [Hardcover]

Stuart Russell (Author), Peter Norvig (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 11, 2009 | ISBN-10: 0136042597 | ISBN-13: 978-0136042594 | Edition: 3

Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, 3e offers the most comprehensive, up-to-date introduction to the theory and practice of artificial intelligence. Number one in its field, this textbook is ideal for one or two-semester, undergraduate or graduate-level courses in Artificial Intelligence.

Dr. Peter Norvig, contributing Artificial Intelligence author and Professor Sebastian Thrun, a Pearson author are offering a free online course at Stanford University on artificial intelligence.

According to an article in The New York Times, the course on artificial intelligence is “one of three being offered experimentally by the Stanford computer science department to extend technology knowledge and skills beyond this elite campus to the entire world.” One of the other two courses, an introduction to database software, is being taught by Pearson author Dr. Jennifer Widom.

Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, 3e is available to purchase as an eText for your Kindle™, NOOK™, and the iPhone®/iPad®.

To learn more about the course on artificial intelligence, visit http://www.ai-class.com. To read the full New York Times article, click here.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Stuart Russell was born in 1962 in Portsmouth, England. He received his B.A. with first-class honours in physics from Oxford University in 1982, and his Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford in 1986. He then joined the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley, where he is a professor of computer science, director of the Center for Intelligent Systems, and holder of the Smith–Zadeh Chair in Engineering. In 1990, he received the Presidential Young Investigator Award of the National Science Foundation, and in 1995 he was cowinner of the Computers and Thought Award. He was a 1996 Miller Professor of the University of California and was appointed to a Chancellor’s Professorship in 2000. In 1998, he gave the Forsythe Memorial Lectures at Stanford University. He is a Fellow and former Executive Council member of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. He has published over 100 papers on a wide range of topics in artificial intelligence. His other books include The Use of Knowledge in Analogy and Induction and (with Eric Wefald) Do the Right Thing: Studies in Limited Rationality.

Peter Norvig is currently Director of Research at Google, Inc., and was the director responsible for the core Web search algorithms from 2002 to 2005. He is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and the Association for Computing Machinery. Previously, he was head of the Computational Sciences Division at NASA Ames Research Center, where he oversaw NASA’s research and development in artificial intelligence and robotics, and chief scientist at Junglee, where he helped develop one of the first Internet information extraction services. He received a B.S. in applied mathematics from Brown University and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California at Berkeley. He received the Distinguished Alumni and Engineering Innovation awards from Berkeley and the Exceptional Achievement Medal from NASA. He has been a professor at the University of Southern California and a research faculty member at Berkeley. His other books are Paradigms of AI Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp and Verbmobil: A Translation System for Faceto-Face Dialog and Intelligent Help Systems for UNIX.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 1152 pages
• Publisher: Prentice Hall; 3 edition (December 11, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0136042597
• ISBN-13: 978-0136042594
• Product Dimensions: 10.4 x 8.4 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (39 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,910 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #4 in Books > Computers & Technology > Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

196 of 211 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A disappointment: minor update not worth the money, February 3, 2010

By 

Damon Deville (Paris, France) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (3rd Edition) (Hardcover)

- With AIMA 1st Edition, I had relearned AI anew from a fresh, insightful and wonderfully pedagogical perspective.
Best computer science textbook ever.
- With AIMA 2nd Edition, I got a lot of recent advances in AI brought to me in the same way, even if presented at times in a way that was too concise for a textbook, and read more like an encyclopedia.
Yet, great 2nd Edition.

- This 3rd Edition is alas AIMA 2.1 and not the AIMA 3.0 that I was waiting for. The new material and new insightful way to organize past material are both scant. Certainly not worth the price for those who own the 2nd Edition.

Don't get me wrong, if you are about to buy your first AI textbook, this is a great buy as it is still light years ahead of the competition. But some chapters that were getting really thin and outdated in 2009 did not get significant updating.

This is particularly true for knowledge representation. Missing are all the recent yet already consolidated advances brought about by the new solutions to the frame problem (such as the fluent calculus), default reasoning, abduction-based and case-based diagnosis, rule-based reasoning (such as constraint handling rules, answer sets, object-oriented logic programming etc.), in short, all forms of reasoning that are neither pure deduction, nor probabilistic. Advances on multi-agent reasoning are also not covered. I understand that to summarize AI in 1000 pages many important topics will not make the cut, but I feel, as a researcher on the topic for the past 25 years and lecturer on it for the past 15 years, that this 3rd edition contains obsolete stuff from the 80s (like frames, semantic networks, production systems, situation calculus, etc.) instead of their modern substitute listed above.

In short, after two Herculean efforts, it seems like the authors put far less work in this one. As a result, we are left without an truly comprehensive and up-to-date text to teach AI and agents. I hope the incoming text by David Poole will cover some of the weaknesses of this AIMA 2.1.

47 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not big changes but still good, January 22, 2010

By 

G. Sarria - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (3rd Edition) (Hardcover)

Artificial Intelligence: A Modern approach is a very good book which explores concepts in the area of AI. It covers most of the techniques in the area (there are some important AI techniques missing such as KDD and Data Mining), however it doesn't go deep in any concept so if you're looking for a specialized reference this is not the one.

The third edition of this book offers a few changes:
- a very updated list of references
- some (not many) new exercises
- they rewrote concepts in order to be up-to-date with the state of the art
- they changed the order of some chapters

All in all, it is still a very good introductory book, it is well-written and very easy to understand. If you are new in the field this is the first textbook to read.

27 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Great book, terrible Kindle conversion, September 18, 2011

By 

Sean Walker (Sacramento, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, 3/e (Kindle Edition)

This is an excellent book however I cannot recommend purchasing the Kindle version of this text. It is atrocious. There are subject headings inserted after the subject is spoken about and, quite often, many heading stacked up on top of each other taking up almost an entire page with useless titles that are in the wrong order anyway. There are no page numbers, which is unacceptable for a text that is used by many college AI programs across the country. There are tons of hyphenation errors. The delineations between figure notes and the text are almost imperceptible so it is difficult to tell what text goes where. In general it is difficult to read and navigate due to this horrible Kindle conversion.