Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach

This is the best introductory review to Artificial Intelligence on the market. It's very well written and organized. There are other books that are better for focusing on one particular aspect of AI, but as a general book this is the best I've seen. If you are looking for a really good introductory textbook to AI that does not completely dumb things down, buy this book.Most of the negative comments about this book come from people stating that it's not a big enough update from the prior edition. While it's true that the entire field of AI has not been completely updated since the last edition, it's also not the case that this book comes out with new editions with the frequency of some Calculus or Economics textbooks where new editions seem to come out purely to ensure students can't buy a used book for the course. The updates are substantial. Whether the new edition gives you enough extra to want to buy it if you own the old edition is a decision only you can make for yourself after spending some time at the website for the book aima.cs.uberkeley.edu.The Kindle conversion of this book is absolutely horrendous. I prefer to buy electronic copies of books if possible so I don't have to carry a heavy hard copy around since I often read while commuting. I would not recommend that for this book, even though at a 1000+ textbook sized pages, it is a pretty substantial book. Fortunately a friend of mine had bought a Kindle copy of the book and I was able to see how bad it was and I bought the hard copy.I recently got an email telling me Amazon was sending out an updated version of the Kindle version of Steve Job's biography because the conversion hadn't been done properly. They really need to do that for this book. Once done it may be a good idea to state on the website that the Kindle conversion has been fixed.

This is by far one of the best books i have ever read. For many years i have struggled with abtuse books on algorithms, programming languages and mathematics. This book is unlike anything i have read before. For the last 20 years, I as a lay person, who has not taken any university classes in AI and programming have had problems moving passed certain levels of complexity in my understanding. Simple things like decision tress and recursion had eluded me in the many books i read, seeming intangible in the areas where they would interface to the real world. Reading the explanations in this book i have finally got it. These authors through scenarios, explanations and code (replicated in many languages on the companion website) explain decision based structures and there use in agent design ,assuming very little along the way, outside of an elementary understanding of programming and logic, thus not losing me the reader. They gave me the building blocks and showed me how and why i would want to assemble them.The code in this book is both beautiful, elegant and succinct all at the same time. The hours of exploration and learning i got from these samples alone were worth the price of the book.If you are learning to program -- Read this book.If you interested in decision and value based reasoning -- Read this book.This is not a short book, but it is well worth the time investment. I plan on having it done within the year. I have learned so much about what i realize i knew so little of before, but I am so much more capable now than i ever was before, and that is because of this book.

This review is organized into two parts. The first part gives a general overview of the textbook and my thoughts about the content, while the second part gives a summary of the problems I've encountered while reading the Kindle version.This book was made by multiple authors. Fortunately, the book's definitions and summaries are generally coherent. It has a through coverage on the history of AI, the definitions (those that are controversial have been noted as such), and provides psuedocode of many algorithms. Similar to other textbooks on this topic, it does not provide run-throughs of those algorithms.The organizations of the book can be improved. I have some problems with the way they organized the material on the second part of the book (II: Problem Solving). Chapter 3 is named "Solving Problems by Searching", but I didn't realize all they did was on classical searches in Chapter 3 until I read Chapter 4. They could have explained why uniform-cost search is uninformed search even though it has a cost function better than they did in the textbook. A better naming scheme for those chapters would be "Ch3: Global Search ", "Ch4: Local Search/... (I would suggest breaking Chapter 4 and put it into different places.)".I bought the Kindle version, and it had many formatting problems. Most of them are minor (such as missing a "space" between two words, images appearing in different locations, image sizes too small, etc.) However, I had caught one specific error in the second part of the book (somewhere between chapter 3-5) where the fact is exactly the opposite than the one written (forgot to add the negation?) I should have marked and noted it so I can write down which error it was in the review but I was too lazy...But it's a good purchase overall!