Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (2nd Edition) (Hardcover)

~ Stuart Russell (Author), (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach introduces basic ideas in artificial intelligence from the perspective of building intelligent agents, which the authors define as "anything that can be viewed as perceiving its environment through sensors and acting upon the environment through effectors." This textbook is up-to-date and is organized using the latest principles of good textbook design. It includes historical notes at the end of every chapter, exercises, margin notes, a bibliography, and a competent index. Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach covers a wide array of material, including first-order logic, game playing, knowledge representation, planning, and reinforcement learning. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

Review

"The publication of this textbook was a major step forward, not only for the teaching of AI, but for the unified view of the field that this book introduces. Even for experts in the field, there are important insights in almost every chapter." — Prof. Thomas Dietterich, Oregon State

"Just terrific. The book I've always been waiting for...the AI bible for the next decade." — Prof. Gerd Brewka (Vienna)

"A marvelous achievement, a truly beautiful book!" — Prof. Selmer Bringsjord, RPI

"It's a great book, with incredible breadth and depth, and very well-written. Everyone I know who has used it in their class has loved it." — Prof. Haym Hirsh, Rutgers

"I am deeply impressed by its unprecedented quality in presenting a coherent, balanced, broad and deep, enjoyable picture of the field of AI. It will become tire standard text for the years to come." — Prof. Wolfgang Bibel, Darmstadt

"Terrific! Well-written and well-organised, with comprehensive coverage of the material that every AI student should know." — Prof. Martha Pollack (Michigan)

"Outstanding ...Its descriptions are extremely clear and readable; its organization is excellent; its examples are motivating; and its coverage is scholarly and throughout! ...will deservedly dominate the field for some time." — Prof. Nils Nilsson, Stanford

"The best book available now...It's almost as good as the book Charniak and I wrote, but more up to date. (Okay I'll admit it, it may even be better than our book.)" — Prof. Drew McDermott, Yale

"A magisterial wide scope account of the entire field of Artificial Intelligence that will enlighten professors as well as students." — Dr. Alan Kay

"This is the book that made me love AI." — Student (Indonesia)

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 1132 pages
• Publisher: Prentice Hall; 2 edition (December 30, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0137903952
• ISBN-13: 978-0137903955
• Product Dimensions: 10.1 x 8.2 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (86 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #154,574 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best Comprehensive text on AI, November 22, 2005

By	calvinnme "Texan refugee" (Fredericksburg, Va) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)

I didn't think that the first edition of this book was as bad as some of the reviewers said, but the second edition is definitely a vast improvement. It's not just some obligatory 2nd edition that some authors release to say that they are staying actively published. The first edition was somewhat confusing in its explanations and the exercises were really blurry on what was being asked. All of that has now been resolved.
The book is a comprehensive and insightful introduction to artificial intelligence with an academic tone. It provides a unified view of the field organized around the rational decision making paradigm, which focuses on the selection of the "best" solution to a problem. The book's overall theme is that the purpose of AI is to solve problems via intelligent agents, and then goes about specifying the features such an agent or agents should have. Pseudocode is provided for all of the major AI algorithms. Being about the broadest book in terms of coverage of AI, you should therefore not expect it to be the deepest in coverage. However, each topic is covered to the extent that the reader should understand its essence. Sections one through six are absolutely wonderful, and comprise the "meat" of AI. Section seven is rather weak since it tries to cover both robotics and text processing in their own individual chapters, and entire books have a hard time covering this material. Section eight is different from the others, since it talks about the philosophy and future of AI.
Another plus for this book is that there is a great deal of extra material that deals with standard AI curriculum. For example, the chapters on logic not only include the typical introduction to propositional and first order logic together with the usual inference procedures, they also give many useful hints how to use first order logic to actually represent aspects of the real world such as measures, time, actions, mental objects, etc. These chapters also contain much information about how to implement efficient logical reasoners.
Finally, this second edition has an excellent website that can be found by going through the publisher's webpage for the book. This website contains four sample chapters, pseudocode, and actual code in Java, Python, and LISP.
I notice that Amazon shows the table of contents from the first edition, so I am showing what the actual table of contents is for the second edition for the purpose of completeness. Note that the book has been significantly reorganized.
I. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE.
1. Introduction.
2. Intelligent Agents.
II. PROBLEM-SOLVING.
3. Solving Problems by Searching.
4. Informed Search and Exploration.
5. Constraint Satisfaction Problems.
6. Adversarial Search.
III. KNOWLEDGE AND REASONING.
7. Logical Agents.
8. First-Order Logic.
9. Inference in First-Order Logic.
10. Knowledge Representation.
IV. PLANNING.
11. Planning.
12. Planning and Acting in the Real World.
V. UNCERTAIN KNOWLEDGE AND REASONING.
13. Uncertainty.
14. Probabilistic Reasoning Systems.
15. Probabilistic Reasoning Over Time.
16. Making Simple Decisions.
17. Making Complex Decisions.
VI. LEARNING.
18. Learning from Observations.
19. Knowledge in Learning.
20. Statistical Learning Methods.
21. Reinforcement Learning.
VII. COMMUNICATING, PERCEIVING, AND ACTING.
22. Agents that Communicate.
23. Text Processing in the Large.
24. Perception.
25. Robotics.
VIII. CONCLUSIONS.
26. Philosophical Foundations.
27. AI: Present and Future.

30 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Second Edition has been published!, January 9, 2003

By	Stuart Russell (Berkeley, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Artificial Intelligence: Modern Approach (Hardcover)

Thanks to all those who reviewed the first edition.
If you are reading this, you will probably want the
second edition instead. It was published Dec 20, 2002.
Every chapter has been extensively rewritten.
Significant new material has been introduced to cover
areas such as constraint satisfaction, fast propositional
inference, planning graphs, internet agents, exact
probabilistic inference, Markov Chain Monte Carlo
techniques, Kalman filters, ensemble learning methods,
statistical learning, probabilistic natural language
models, probabilistic robotics, and ethical aspects of AI.

For more information, see aima.cs.berkeley.edu

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Give the Second Edition a Chance, January 3, 2003

By A Customer

Most of the reviews here refer to the first edition, not the second. There have been significant changes to the second edition. Amazon should consider using a display that clarifies which edition each review refers to.