Customer Reviews

Hands-on AI with Java : Smart Gaming, Robots, and More

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The CD for this book was not included... an error by the publisher who is hoping to fix it some time in the future.

All of the code can be found at http://www.simreal.com and yes, contrary to some reports, it does in fact all compile and work.

This book is introductory in scope and provides working examples for a number of AI techniques, written in Java.

The author (me) can be contacted at edwin@simreal.com.

This book was not very informative, and wasn't much more
than an author's personal flag waving about the facts that
making packages are possible. The book comes without the cd,
no code dump's/listings, and much worse, doesn't really
compile most of the time. The content is confusing at best,
and I was quite frustrated that the author was audacious
enough to put the name Java on the cover. Not even good as
a reference-

Don't let the cover image fool you, the author should stick
to cover design, ...if that.

Take some advice, don't waste your money as i did.
Buy a better reference like:
Constructing Intelligent Agents Using Java: Pro. Developer's Guide, 2E;
ISBN: 047139601X

I have personally perused the Constructing... book in a local
bookstore and found it much more worth my time and on point.

This better help-

This book has all of the right topics: control, finite state machines, search algorithms, neural networks, etc. However, in the end, you really won't learn anything. It is ponderous that this author could fill so many pages with text, figures, equations, and code and never actually tell you anything. The problem is, that everything he tells you is correct. However, in the end, it is like a jigsaw puzzle with all of the pieces thrown up in the air. Yes, he shows Java code, but the guts of the algorithms that make it perform artificial intelligence tasks are missing. Yes, his equations are all correct, but he doesn't tell you how he is going to take these equations, form an algorithm, and then turn that into Java code that works to control a robot - not on a macro level, not on a micro level.

I suggest that instead of this book you look at several other good ones on the subject. For learning neural networks and their implementation in Java, I really enjoyed "Introduction to Neural Networks with Java" by Heaton. For a good practical book on behavior-based robotics try "Robot Programming : A Practical Guide to Behavior-Based Robotics" by Jones and Roth. They do an excellent job of describing state machines and algorithms for robotic control where this book fails miserably. "AI Application Programming" does a good job of explaining all of the AI algorithms on a practical level with plenty of working code. Finally, you might want to look at "The Definitive Guide to Building Java Robots" only if you already know the algorithms involved in building robots, but you would like a tutorial in how some of the specialized Java API's might help you perform this task. For example it shows how to use the Java Speech API implementation, FreeTTS, for doing speech recognition and synthesis on a robot.