Description
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a big field, and this is a big book. We have tried to explore the full breadth of the field, which encompasses logic, probability, and continuous mathematics; perception, reasoning, learning, and action; and everything from microelectronic devices to robotic planetary explorers. The book is also big because we go into some depth. The subtitle of this book is “A Modern Approach.” The intended meaning of this rather empty phrase is that we have tried to synthesize what is now known into a common frame-work, rather than trying to explain each subfield of AI in its own historical context. We apologize to those whose subfields are, as a result, less recognizable.
New to this edition
This edition captures the changes in Al that have taken place since the last edition in 2003. There have been important applications of AI technology, such as the widespread deploy-ment of practical speech recognition, machine translation autonomous vehicles, and house-hold robotics. There have been algorithmic landmarks, such as the solution of the game of checkers. And there has been a great deal of theoretical progress, particularly in areas such as probabilistic reasoning, machine learning, and computer vision. Most important from our point of view is the continued evolution in how we think about the field, and thus how we organize the book. The major changes are as follows:
- We place more emphasis on partially observable and nondeterministic environments, especially in the nonprobabilistic settings of search and planning. The concepts of belief state (a set of possible worlds) and stare estimation (maintaining the belief state) are introduced in these settings; later in the book, we add probabilities.
- In addition to discussing the types of environments and types of agents, we now cover in more depth the types of representations that an agent can use. We distinguish among atomic representations (in which each slate of the world is treated as a black box), factored representations (in which a state is a set of attribute/value pairs), and structured representations (in which the world consists of objects and relations between them).
- Our coverage of planning goes into more depth on contingent planning in partially observable environments and includes a new approach to hierarchical planning.
- We have added new material on first-order probabilistic models, including open-universe models for cases where there is uncertainty as to what objects exist.
- We have completely rewritten the introductory machine-learning chapter, stressing a wider variety of more modern learning algorithms and placing them on a firmer theo-retical footing.
- We have expanded coverage of Web search and information extraction, and of tech-niques for learning from very large data sets.
- 20% of the citations in this edition are to works published after 2003.
- We estimate that about 20% of the material is brand new. The remaining SO% reflects older work but has been largely rewritten to present a more unified picture of the field.
Overview of the book
The main unifying theme is the idea of an intelligent agent. We define Al as the study of agents that receive percepts from the environment and perform actions. Each such agent im-plements a function that maps percept sequences to actions, and we cover different ways to represent these functions, such as reactive agents, real-time planners, and decision-theoretic systems. We explain the role of learning as extending the reach of the designer into unknown environments, and we show how that role constrains agent design, favoring explicit knowledge representation and reasoning. We treat robotics and vision not as independently defined problems, but as occurring in the service of achieving,goals. We stress the importance of the task environment in determining the appropriate agent design.
Our primary aim is to convey the ideas that have emerged over the past fifty years of Al research and the past two millennia of related work. We have tried to avoid excessive formal-ity in the presentation of these ideas while retaining precision. We have included pseudocode algorithms to make the key ideas concrete; our pseudocode is described in Appendix B.
This book is primarily intended for use in an undergraduate course or course sequence. The book has 27 chapters, each requiring about a week’s worth of lectures, so working through the whole book requires a two-semester sequence. A one-semester course can use selected chapters to suit the interests of the instructor and students. The book can also be used in a graduate-level course (perhaps with the addition of some of the primary sources suggested in the bibliographical notes). Sample syllabi are available at the book’s Web site. airia . es . berkeley edu. The only prerequisite is familiarity with basic concepts of computer science (algorithms, data structures, complexity) at a sophomore level. Freshman calculus and linear algebra are useful for some of the topics; the required mathematical back-ground is supplied in Appendix A. Exercises are given at the end of each chapter. Exercises requiring significant pro-gramming are marked with a keyboard icon.
These exercises can best be solved by taking advantage of the code repository at a ima c s . berkeley.edu. Some of them are large enough to be considered term projects. A number of exercises require some investigation of the literature; these are marked with a book icon.
Throughout the book, important points are marked with a pointing icon. We have in-cluded an extensive index of around 6,000 items to make it easy to find things in the book. Wherever a new term is first defined, it is also marked in the margin.