Rating: 
Summary: the best AI textbook available now
Review: Comments from my studentsComments on AI: A Modern Approach
Having used this book, I have found it to be an excellent overview of modern AI techniques. In fact, I knew nothing about many of the subjects in this book before this course, and this book has helped intrigue my interest sufficiently into the field.
This book uses an intelligent agent as the unifying theme throughout. Namely, the problem of AI is to describe and build agents that receive percepts from the environment and perform actions, and each such agent is implemented by a function that maps percepts to actions. It covers different ways to represent these functions, such as production systems, reactive agents, logical planners and decision-theoretic systems. It explains the role of learning as extending the reach of the designer into unknown environments, and shows how it constrains agent design. All in all, the book is quite readable and well organized.
In addition, the references to important works in the field were extremely useful, especially since many of them are now available online. What¡¯s more, these exercises are complete and thorough. They cover the entire breadth of the chapter, and each are detailed enough to challenge the students as more than a trivial problem.
While each topic is treated carefully and explanations are clear, unfortunately the book would run to many volumes if each topic was covered completely. Since this is not the aim of the book, this is not a drawback. AI:AMA is, after all, an introductory text to AI used in many undergraduate AI courses. Every one who is learning AI should have this book on their shelf. Student ID: 0020309059 Comments on ¡°Artificial Intelligence-A modern Approach¡± I think this book is the leading textbook in Artificial Intelligence I have ever read. The Artificial Intelligence is a big area, this book give me a whole view of it.
Besides all those good idea in this textbook, I think there is flaw in AIMI 2nd.
First of all the whole book doesn¡¯t have a detailed example that can lead reader the way to build AI application from scratch although there are many little examples and figures in the book. I think AI is a practical subject.
Second, Agent is hot and useful in AI now. I think there should be more pages on Agent and the application of Agent. Comments on ¡°Artificial Intelligence-A modern Approach¡±
I think this book is fairly valuable both for the beginners and for the specialists. This book has the following three characteristics compared with the books on AI that I read before:
A new perspective of building intelligent agents: The book is organized around intelligent agents: what the ideas of agent are; how they make decisions and get information; how they learn knowledge. From this perspective a wide array of materials on AI is well organized and presented to the readers clearly and readably. Finished this book, I found myself have attained an overview of Artificial Intelligence.
This text book is organized using the latest principles of good textbook design. It includes historical notes at the end of every chapter, exercises, margin notes, a bibliography, and a competent index. The historical notes are much helpful to me, from which I could get much information on the corresponding domains and I could read more that I am interested.
The text book contains many valuable and comprehensive examples to illustrate the ideas it presents. The exercise is also good. They are both helpful to me to grasp the knowledge of AI.
Besides those small examples which are responsible for illustrate the basic ideas and concepts, one or two ¡®big¡¯ examples which illustrate the process of building practical artificial intelligent systems must be helpful to us. I am a graduate student who major in Computer Science. I use the book ¡°Artificial Intelligence¡± as my textbook in the course of AI. After one semester¡¯s study, I find this book is a good one. As we all know, AI is a big field, and it is very difficult to write a good book of AI because that book must be a big one. But the style, the concept and the practicability of this book are excellent.
Firstly, when I read the book, I was deeply absorbing by its style. It describes the key concepts of a problem and its solution first, then give examples, and finally give a theoretical explanation, with rigorous theoretical analysis where appropriate. The point of the theory is always to get the concepts across and explain how they are used in actual, fielded systems. During the course of my reading, I had a clear mind. I could find the right reason why this problem could be promoted, what¡¯s the mathematic model of it, and how it could be solved in several methods.
Secondly, I enjoy the concept of the book. I think the writer must have a good sense of humor. I clearly remembered I fell into a big laughed when I read the example that ¡°if you left your car outside all the night, you might find your spare tyro missing next morning.¡± What a funny story it is!
Finally, the practicability of the book is good. Because of its comprehensive coverage and large number of detailed algorithms, it is useful as a primary reference volume for me.
Just as Prof. Tom Dietterich has said: ¡°I recommend it to anyone who wants to have an introductory overview of the state of AI. And I recommend it to experts in the field, who will enjoy its unified description of the field.¡±
Rating: 
Summary: Good book , Computer Science majors only!
Review: Good coverage of rationality, the structure of agents, search algorithms, and decision trees. However, the book is highly theoretical and mathematical, it would not be appropriate for any business majors. I teach Information Systems in a college, I still use Kurzweil's book because I cannot find anything better suited to our needs.
Rating: 
Summary: Good from a beginners standpoint.
Review: As a relative newbie in the Artificial Intelligence scene this book was my first (I must admit I haven't finished reading it yet). It provides a different way to look at the world around you so that you are able to break it down into discrete sections which are easier to transform into whatever computer language you chose. At least in the early chapters it can get bogged down with some math it tries not to lose you too quickly. For a newcomer to the Artificial Inteligence world this is a pretty good book, for more advanced programmers I can't really say (not being one myself)
Rating:
Summary: Comprehensive
Review: This was my introductory text to AI and I admit that I've read only the first edition of this book. However, while browsing through the 2nd edition in a bookstore I found that the things that annoy me are still there - the pervasive taxonomy of tomatoes and the simplistic philosophy are just not appropriate for a book that tends to be considered the Bible of AI. It is otherwise a great and well-targeted book and I enjoyed reading it. The second edition seems to have grown a bit bigger, including such topics as the EM algorithm, which I find very good. I heartily recommend it to anyone new to AI, except if you're really afraid of finding out how tomatoes are classified :)
Rating:
Summary: Good but limited
Review: This is probably the most up-to-date single textbook introducing Artificial Intelligence. Unfortunately, it presents a limited view of the field by chosing not to cover the vast area of AI that deals with cognitive modeling. The authors are up front about this decision and define AI as the study of agents that act rationally [Preface and Introduction] and specifically choose not to address the schools of thought and ongoing research in AI that consider "Systems that think like humans" and "Systems that act like humans" [Introduction]. What's covered is done well. Students of AI and other readers will need to augment this text for exposure to the rest of the discipline.
Rating:
Summary: The "must own" AI textbook
Review: If you want to get to know the field of AI as it stands today, then this is the book to own. It's a large book and it delivers a rigorous amount of material in a well thought out way. Not just a good AI book, but I would consider this one of the most interesting and thoughtfully structured textbooks I've seen on any subject.
Rating:
Summary: Second Edition has been published!
Review: Thanks to all those who reviewed the first edition.
If you are reading this, you will probably want the
second edition instead. It was published Dec 20, 2002.
Every chapter has been extensively rewritten.
Significant new material has been introduced to cover
areas such as constraint satisfaction, fast propositional
inference, planning graphs, internet agents, exact
probabilistic inference, Markov Chain Monte Carlo
techniques, Kalman filters, ensemble learning methods,
statistical learning, probabilistic natural language
models, probabilistic robotics, and ethical aspects of AI. For more information, see aima.cs.berkeley.edu
Rating:
Summary: Give the Second Edition a Chance
Review: Most of the reviews here refer to the first edition, not the second. There have been significant changes to the second edition. Amazon should consider using a display that clarifies which edition each review refers to.
Rating:
Summary: A good book
Review: The book gives a good introduction to the field and tries to explain the underlying problems and challenges and their possible solutions. The material can be hard at times but that is the nature of the beast called "AI" and not because of any lack of explanation. The undergrad course I took with the book was tough but I think it was very worthwhile. I recommend a little prior knowledge of math however.
Rating: 
Summary: Buyer Beware
Review: I am a Computer Science major at UGA and I can honestly say that this book is the absolute worst of any that I have ever read. This book does a very poor (shallow and technical) job of explaining most topics and is incredibly difficult to follow. Chapter 1 is enough to drive you insane! After reading some sections multiple times, I still don't understand what they're trying to say. This book needs more examples and better explanations. I would have given it a 0 or even a negative score, but 1 was the lowest score possible.
| 
