As a novice which book should I buy about Artificial Intelligence?

Question

I'm taking an introductory course about Artificial Intelligence. It's mainly a survey of famous techniques, without any practical laboratory or assignment, and seems quite pointless to me.

I want to buy a good book (read theoretical but practical at once) about Artificial Intelligence. Does anyone have some good direction to suggest?

Answer 1

I've read Introduction to AI & Expert System by D.W. Patterson in my MCA. It is good and easy read.

Answer 2

When I was at University my recommended reading was Artificial Intelligence by Rob Callan. Good overall look at the topic and not dated so good as a starting point.

Answer 3

When I took the class at UC Berkeley we had to use the book Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig. I highly recommend it!

Answer 4

In addition to the classic Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (AIMA), I suggest a recent one from MIT Press: "How Body Shapes The Way We Think".

http://www.amazon.com/How-Body-Shapes-Way-Think/dp/0262162393

As far as I remember AIMA, it was more like the classical approach to AI, when they thought that you can solve problems by designing solutions. My biased view from the evolutionary computation is that for the really hard problems we should let the solutions evolve themselves. AIMA is still good and a must read (the first ten or so chapters) for the basics, a kind of reductionist view.

The main idea of the other book is the embodiment. One needs a body (sensors and actuators) which allows to be or become intelligent. Still reading the other book, but the first chapters have proved quite enlightening. Might be especially useful for those who are interested in robotics.

Answer 5

I understand what you mean. A lot of AI courses and books especially ones targeted at beginners make the subject very dry with lesser emphasis on the applications and totally miss the forest for the trees.

I dont know what prerequisites you have taken in your class but I recommend these resources:

• AAAI is an excellent site that has all the important resources for students including discussions, links, videos and books. Highly recommended.
• Artificial intelligence is a huge field. An awesome survey of all the important sections i.e learning, planning, problem solving techniques, including some philosophical implications are discussed in the AI:Modern Approach. The writing is very lucid ,the chapters are self-contained , you can select what you like and start hacking immediately. The site also has links to courses that used this book so you can get a lot of cool project ideas, assignments etc.
• Peter Norvig's PAIP is another good book. I have not read this but many of my friends say that the projects in the book are top notch and some even claim that this is the best programming book ever. It should be fun to implement Prolog. However you should know Lisp. There was an attempt to port it into Ruby but I dont know how successful was the project.
• There are also tons of books on game programming in ai. I am not really interested in these so I cant help you with them but a quick google/amazon search should give you some nice applications of AI.
• The open directory project also has good handpicked resources ,books ,links to softwares and algorithm implementations that you can use in your project.
• I have a wishlist in Amazon if you are interested.
• Or you could see lists like these

If you need more info, holler.

Answer 6

Artificial Intelligence for Games from Ian Millington is a good book not for overall AI but for some AI problems explained on a real life problem