Computers and Thought provides a unified, self-contained introduction to artificial intelligence for readers with little or no computing background. It presents an original extended AI programming project - the Automated Tourist Guide exercise throughout the main chapters of the text to illustrate the material covered and show how AI actually works. Most chapters illustrate a particular AI topic, with sections on the background to the topic, methods, applications, and the limitations of previous proposals. In addition, there are end of chapter summaries and graded exercises, suggested readings, a glossary, and an appendix on programming. Computers and Thought details the theory and issues involved in AI and covers computer simulation of human activities, such as problem solving and natural language understanding, and computer vision. Its investigation of AI is usefully extended to models of cognition, the nature of mind and intelligence, and the social implications of AI and cognitive science. The computer language is POP-11, an easy to learn language that can be used interactively, like LISP, and that has an appearance similar to PASCAL. It is not necessary to run the illustrative POP-11 programs on a computer, since a feature of the language is the ease with which it can be understood from the printed page.

Computers and Thought is included in the series Explorations in Cognitive Science, edited by Margaret A Boden. A Bradford Book

Review:

Computers and Thought: A Practical Introduction to Artificial Intelligence is one of the few artificial intelligence textbooks that describes cognitive models in detail. However, one of the book's shortcomings is that it uses POP-11, an obscure Lisp-like programming language, to create the example programs. To read the example programs, you will first have to slog through a tutorial on POP-11 and, because you will probably not have a POP-11 compiler, you will not be able to try out the examples. The bulk of the book is dedicated to describing standard artificial intelligence topics, such as search and knowledge representation.

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