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A fascinating portrait of the people, programs, and ideas that have driven the search to create thinking machines. Rich with anecdotes about the founders and leaders and their celebrated feuds and intellectual gamesmanship, AI chronicles their dramatic successes and failures and discusses the next nece ssary breakthrough: teaching computers "common sense".

Perhaps no venture in the history of computing has produced so many high hopes and attracted so many brilliant minds, yet produced so many daunting failures as the quest for artificial intelligence. Daniel Crevier' fascinating and deeply researched history of the AI traces the search for machine intelligence from the optimistic first experiments of the mid 1950s, through the classic projects of the next two decades, on to the mixed fortunes of the commercial AI ventures that began in the 1980s. In addition to being a history of an intellectual field, it's a portrait gallery of the brilliant and often eccentric people who built it. Crevier's discussion does not demand a programming background, yet takes the reader deeply into theoretical issues that make us ponder the phenomenon of human intelligence.