Artificial Intelligence: Theory and Practice

Rating:
Summary: Serious errors
Review: I used to use this text for AI undergraduate courses, and have given up. It has grievous errors in it, including in the on-line errata. Two quick examples: the information theoretic equations for decision trees is dead wrong. And the alpha-beta algorithm is completely incorrect. The text also has packed large amounts of information into very tight spaces, leading to poor explanations in important sections: the backpropagation section in particular consistently leads to serious confusion among students. And attempts to reduce algorithms into a procedural rather than functional/recursive format only result in excess complexity.

This is particularly frustrating because there really is no good undergraduate text for AI. This one comes close, packing in lots of stuff into an inexpensive volume. But the errors are serious enough, and in such high-utility sections, that this book cannot be recommended.

Rating:
Summary: This is a useful book by eminent authors.
Review: This is a good book for the beginners in the subject. I liked the book for its beautiful writing style. The most useful chapters of this book are chapter 5 on learning, chapter 7 on planning and chapter 9 on image understanding.The concepts on the situation calculus discussed in chapter 6 are also presented very interestingly. The examples used to illustrate different issues are realistic. The book must be on the desk of anyone interested in the domain of Artificial Intelligence.