Most previous treatments of artificial intelligence have been divided into the major areas of application, including natural language processing, automatic programming, robotics, machine vision, automatic theorem proving, and intelligent data retrieval systems. The major difficulty with this approach is that these application areas are now so extensive that each could be only superficially treated in a book of this length. The goal of this book is to describe the fundamental AI ideas that underly many of these applications. The organization of these ideas is not based on the application itself but on general computational concepts. The book is designed as an introductory text on artificial intelligence. It is assumed that the reader has a background in the fundamentals of computer science; knowledge of a list processing language, such as LISP, would be helpful. At the end of each chapter the reader will find many exercises and citations which should provide interested students with adequate entry points to the most important literature in the field.

Table of Contents
Preface / Acknowledgements / Credits / Prologue / Production Systems and AI / Search Strategies for AI Production Systems / Search Strategies for Decomposable Production Systems / The Predicate Calculus in AI / Resolution Refutation Systems / Rule-Based Deduction Systems / Basic Plan-Generating Systems / Advanced Plan-Generating Systems / Structured Object Representations / Prospectus / Bibliography / Author Index / Subject Index.