BOOK: "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach"

[tcmay@sensemedia.net (Timothy C. May)]

On a lighter note, I've recently gotten a new book, "Artificial
Intelligence: A Modern Approach," by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig, 1995,
Prentice-Hall, ISBN 0-13-103805-2.

In 900 pages of well laid-out text, with excellent use of typography to
make finding topics easy, it seems to be a great compendium of methods
loosely called "AI."

AI has gotten a bad rap, perhaps deservedly after the hype of the mid-80s,
but the methods are useful for various purposes.

This book is focussed on "agents," and lots of code fragments are available
(in Common Lisp) for actual construction of agents. Topics that relate to
Cypherpunks are scattered throughout the text, including stuff on planning,
provably correct designs, game theory, simulations, neural nets, belief,
and ontology. Lots more stuff, too. (If I were writing a formal book
review, I'd say more. But this is just a pointer, so that interested folks
can check it out at their local technical bookstore or university library.)

Not a lot to do with getting PGP 3.0 out the door, and not a lot to do with
building remailers, but stuff I find interesting.

Let a thousand flowers bloom.

--Tim May

..........................................................................
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