Customer Reviews

The Quest for Artificial Intelligence

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Nils J. Nilsson's book begins with the story of how artificial intelligence originated in 1956 at a Dartmouth summer project that had the goal of "making a machine behave in ways that would be called intelligent if a human were so behaving." It relates how in the fifty-plus years that followed, AI has been the subject of overly-optimistic predictions, academic arguments that its goals are unachievable, funding excesses, and funding droughts. But the underlying reality is that AI has contributed key components to the technology foundations that shaped the modern world, and indeed has transformed our view of machines and of our relation to them.

The algorithms that compute your driving directions, and also compute the paths of characters in video games? They rely on results from AI research on mobile, intelligent robots. Those surprisingly high-quality voice response systems we encounter when we phone a customer-service number? They use results from AI research in speech recognition. The recommender systems ("You might also like") used by many web vendors? They use machine learning methods whose history is described by Nilsson. And AI technology is embedded in a host of less-apparent applications ranging from medical devices to automated securities trading systems.

Nils J. Nilsson's comprehensive account of the evolution of AI covers the field from its inception to recent times. All the major sub-fields of AI receive attention--from game playing to automatic problem solving, from computer vision to speech and language understanding, from expert systems to machine learning and probabilistic reasoning--all these and more are covered.

Nilsson enriches his account by viewing major developments through a multi-faceted prism. He describes AI's challenges, the approaches adopted and the landmark systems in just enough detail to give the reader real insight into the technical substance of the field. He also describes the funding issues and controversies that have swirled around AI since that very first Dartmouth meeting. And he introduces the reader to scores of brilliant, frequently colorful, characters whose contributions and opinions have influenced the course of developments.

For the AI practitioner, this book is a rare example of that often proclaimed, but seldom sighted species, the "essential volume" for your library. Your perspective on AI cannot help but be enhanced; you'll gain an increased appreciation for the time it takes for a good idea to mature and find a place in the world; and you may even be encouraged to revisit nearly-forgotten ideas that have relevance to current research issues.

But the book has appeal for the general reader as well. Nilsson is a masterful teacher and storyteller, and his description of timeless philosophical issues and intellectual challenges are as clear as you will find in as confined a space. Technical approaches are profusely illustrated and diagrammed, but remain accessible to any reader with an active curiosity. The tone of the book is straightforward and conversational, with neither the stuffiness of a self-important academic nor the breeziness of a science popularizer.

Predictions about AI have proven hazardous for 50 years, but I'll make one here: It will be a long time before any writer attempts a sequel to this unique and valuable volume.

This is an extremely literate, well written history of the first fifty years of AI by someone who fortuitously came in on the ground floor of this field. Nilsson's perspective is unique and invaluable for anyone interested in broadening their horizons, and in appreciating how many talented and driven individuals have contributed to AI's successes.

As a lay reader, I skipped the notes and many of the technical details and diagrams. I enjoyed the many interesting references scattered through the text. Just to give a flavor of these, in the first chapter alone there are references to Homer's "Iliad", Ovid's "Metamorphosis", The Talmud, opera (Offenbach's "Tales of Hoffman"), and theater, Capek's "R.U.R." I won't mention more of them here but leave them for you to discover, choice morsels all. Although this is a scholarly work, it's accessible to anyone who is interested in what AI is all about.
AI has already become an integral part of our lives. It's used for computing driving directions, interactive computer games, aircraft control, credit card fraud detection, vending machine currency recognition, robot control, speech recognition, and face identification, to name just some of the more prominent examples.

I came away marveling at how far this field has come in 50 years and convinced of the need for more basic research. Most of the important inventions were due to basic research. At the time, the results, to an untrained eye, looked stunningly simple. People thought, "What good is that?" We're now reaping the harvest of those years of early work, and one hopes that, along with applications, basic research in the field will continue.

This book is a significant contribution to the history of science.

There is a great deal of good material here. I wonder if the general problem of producing a history of AI would not have been better decomposed into a set of mini-histories each concerned with a particular topic and occupying a single chapter. For example, NLP, machine vision, robotics, knowledge representation, vagaries of public/private financing, major commercial deployments, etc. each could have been addressed in a single chapter. In this book, individual topics pop up again and again in interleaved fashion as the author's single timeline unfolds. This may be a bit disconcerting for readers not already well versed in the field. Other advantages of a modular approach to the history of AI rather than a simple sequential approach are ease of updating the text for future editions and the ability of subject matter experts to quickly find and provide constructive feedback in their areas of expertise.

A minor irritation was the use of URLs in body text rather than confining them to end notes. Most authors would like their books to be timeless; the use of highly fragile URLs in body text seems to contradict this goal.

I suspect that this is the best history of AI we have so far. I recommend this book to anyone interested in the field.

Professor Nilsson's humanistic account of the dreamy beginnings: Venus bringing an ivory statue of a beautiful maiden to life, "The girl felt the kisses he gave, blushed, and raising her bashful eyes to the light, saw both her lover and the sky"; and continuing on in an intuitive sequence from "early explorations" to "the quest toward human-level Artificial Intelligence" is a readily readable and engaging tour de force.

The scope is grand and encyclopedic; it is the culmination of a lifetime of brilliant scholarship and acclaimed teaching.