Computers and Thought: Practical Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (Explorations in Cognitive Science)

This textbook is a unified, self-contained introduction to artificial intelligence for readers with little or no computing background. The text presents original AI programming projects throughout to illustrate the material covered and to show how AI actually works. In addition, there are end-of-chapter summaries and graded exercises, suggested readings, a glossary, and an appendix on programming. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

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.