Artificial Intelligence(AI)

Artificial Intelligence(AI) is a big field. We have tried to explore the full breadth of the field, which encompasses logic, probability, and continuous mathematics; perception, reasoning, learning, and action; and everything from microelectronic devices to robotic planetary explorers.

Our primary aim is to convey the ideas that have emerged over the past fifty years of AI research and the past two millennia of related work. We have tried to avoid excessive formality in the presentation of these ideas while retaining precision. We have included pseudocode algorithms to make the key ideas concrete.

The important applications of AI technology, such as the widespread deployment of practical speech recognition, machine translation, autonomous vehicles, and household robotics. There have been algorithmic landmarks, such as the solution of the game of checkers. And there has been a great deal of theoretical progress, particularly in areas such as probabilistic reasoning, machine learning, and computer vision. Most important from our point of view is the continued evolution in how we think about the field, and thus how we organize the book. The major changes are as follows:

1. We place more emphasis on partially observable and nondeterministic environments, especially in the nonprobabilistic settings of search and planning. The concepts of belief state (a set of possible worlds) and state estimation (maintaining the belief state) are introduced in these settings; later in the book, we add probabilities.
2. In addition to discussing the types of environments and types of agents, we now cover in more depth the types of representations that an agent can use. We distinguish among atomic representations (in which each state of the world is treated as a black box), factored representations (in which a state is a set of attribute/value pairs), and structured representations (in which the world consists of objects and relations between them).
3. Our coverage of planning goes into more depth on contingent planning in partially observable environments and includes a new approach to hierarchical planning.
4. We have added new material on first-order probabilistic models, including open-universe models for cases where there is uncertainty as to what objects exist.
5. We have completely rewritten the introductory machine-learning chapter, stressing a wider variety of more modern learning algorithms and placing them on a firmer theoretical footing.
6. We have expanded coverage of Web search and information extraction, and of techniques for learning from very large data sets.
7. We estimate that about 20% of the material is brand new. The remaining 80% reflects older work but has been largely rewritten to present a more unified picture of the field.

MID's specially focused on Statistics, Uncertainty, and Bayes networks, Machine Learning, Logic and Planning, Markov Decision Processes and Reinforcement Learning, Hidden Markov Models and Filters, Adversarial and Advanced Planning, Image Processing and Computer Vision, Robotics and robot motion planning, Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval.