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New, inside & out. .. A must have if you need.. Introduction to Artificial Intelligence ..Hard cover .Fomer owners name on first page ..I Ship Fast,from our warehouse, In A box, Bubble wrapped , with FREE U.S.P.S. delivery confirmation ... Read more

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One of the earliest dreams of the fledgling field of artificial intelligence (AI) was to build computer programs that could play games as well as or better than the best human players. Despite early optimism in the field, the challenge proved to be surprisingly difficult. However, the 1990s saw amazing progress. Computers are now better than humans in checkers, Othello and Scrabble; are at least as good as the best humans in backgammon and chess; and are rapidly improving at hex, go, poker, and shogi. This book documents the progress made in computers playing games and puzzles. The book is the definitive source for material of high-performance game-playing programs.
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Competing for a $30 million prize, a team is developing an unmanned lunar rover that performs well, perhaps even a bit too well. Aerospace writer Midge McConnell becomes suspicious of the rover’s human-like performance. Her investigations will take her from Hollywood, to the halls of academia, through the Air Force’s Satellite Surveillance Headquarters, onto a lethally guarded Texas research site, inside an exotic lakeside Chinese Traditional Medicine Sanatorium, and to the Xichang Rocket Launch Base in Sichuan Province, China. What she discovers will put her squarely on the horns of a moral dilemma. International relations here on earth, and perhaps the survival of the human species in future space colonies will depend on her choice.

This techno thriller is based on two contradicting statements made recently: (1) English physicist Stephen Hawking proclaimed that the future survival of the human species depends on space travel to other planets, and (2), a former NASA official said that until we can engineer a tiny person, long space trips carrying human intelligence is not practical.

Could an autonomous intelligent computer bridge this gap? Would it be capable of making necessary moral decisions? The dilemma is solved by a terminally ill quadriplegic’s immoral human decision; lie about the robotic intelligence by putting himself secretly aboard and pretend to be a computer, a COMPUTER BRAIN.
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Customer Reviews (1)

We have Mobile Phones. Why not a Mobile Brain?
In COMPUTER BRAIN, Dr. Dusenbury continues Michael Crichton's tradition of weaving the threads of real facts into the fabric of a disturbingly plausible scientific fiction. The story launches from the real fact of the $30 million Lunar X-Prize for the first private venture robotics team to reach the moon. It is not much of a reach of imagination that a competitive team's ambitionmight tempt it to take steps to shorten the development time while choosing to shorten a life.
It would also not be a stretch of the imagination that the author himself wrote this review to encourage others to read the book and contribute a thoughtful and hopefully a 5 starreview.
Download a free sample on I-Phone or Kindle Reader.
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"Aaron's Code" tells the story of the first profound connection between art and computer technology. Here is the work of Harold Cohen - the renowned abstract painter who, at the height of a celebrated career in the late 1960's, abandoned the international scene of museums and galleries and sequestered himself with the most powerful computers he could get his hands on. What emerged from his long years of solitary struggle is an elaborate computer program that makes drawings autonomously, without human intervention - an electronic apprentice and alter ego called Aaron. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Excellent source of information about Aaron
This is a very good book. McCorduck is an excellent writer (I alsorecommend her "Machines Who Think") who tackles the fascinatingarea of AI art. Information about the art-generating program Aaron is hardto come by and this book is the best source I've encountered so far. Thehistory of Harold Cohen is a fascinating read.

I would have liked tohave seen coverage of more AI art makers, but perhaps Aaron is the only oneworth considering. For more on AI art in general, see Boden's "TheCreative Mind."

Way to go Pamela! ... Read more

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Artificial Intelligence provides a comprehensive coverage of the fundamental concepts and techniques in AI.The focus of this text is to solve real-world problems using the latest AI techniques. Intelligent systems like expert systems, fuzzy systems, artificial neural networks, genetic algorithms and ant colony systems are discussed in detail with case studies to facilitate in- depth understanding.Since the ultimate goal of AI is the construction of programs to solve problems, an entire chapter has been devoted to the programming languages used in AI problem solving.The theory is well supported by a large number of illustrations and end-chapter exercises. With its comprehensive coverage of the subject in a clear and concise manner this text would be extremely useful not only for undergraduate students, but also to postgraduate students. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

diverse applications
A good textbook on the subject of artificial intelligence. Directed to a student new to the field. The chapters contain exercises to aid in understanding the various concepts.

Padhy shows that AI applications are now quite diverse. From robotics, which was the original motivation, to pure software. Where the latter might be for financial applications, or chemical synthesis. However, the book fails to convey that the formal logic approach to AI seems to have run into diminishing returns, as far as actually understanding or implementing a breakthrough AI system. [Which is part of the allure of alternatives like neural nets.]

For a text of over 600 pages, the book is remarkably cheaply priced. Excellent value for a student on a budget. ... Read more

Product Description
Creativity is one of the least understood aspects ofintelligence and is often seen as `intuitive' and not susceptible torational enquiry. Recently, however, there has been a resurgence ofinterest in the area, principally in artificial intelligence andcognitive science, but also in psychology, philosophy, computerscience, logic, mathematics, sociology, and architecture and design.This volume brings this work together and provides an overview of thisrapidly developing field. It addresses a range of issues. Cancomputers be creative? Can they help us to understand humancreativity? How can artificial intelligence (AI) enhance humancreativity? How, in particular, can it contribute to the `sciences ofthe artificial', such as design? Does the new wave of AI(connectionism, geneticism and artificial life) offer more promise inthese areas than classical, symbol-handling AI? What would theimplications be for AI and cognitive science if computers couldnot be creative?
These issues are explored in five interrelated parts, each of which isintroducted and explained by a leading figure in the field.
- Prologue (Margaret Boden)
- Part I: Foundational Issues (Terry Dartnall)
- Part II: Creativity and Cognition (Graeme S. Halford andRobert Levinson)
- Part III: Creativity and Connectionism (Chris Thornton)
- Part IV: Creativity and Design (John Gero)
- Part V: Human Creativity Enhancement (Ernest Edmonds)
- Epilogue (Douglas Hofstadter)
For researchers in AI, cognitive science, computer science,philosophy, psychology, mathematics, logic, sociology, andarchitecture and design; and anyone interested in the rapidly growingfield of artificial intelligence and creativity.
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Artificial Intelligence algorithms and programs are rapidly outgrowing the computational powers of most present-day, conventional computers. The support of efficient symbolic processing requires the development of new architectural features, languages, algorithms and representation schemes. This book provides a comprehensive, state-of-the-art treatment of the design issues and current research efforts in the area of Artificial Intelligence application support systems. This book includes sample designs for hardware and software; a section on data parallelism in AI processing, using the Connection Machine as a real-life example, and extensive discussion of LISP machines, Smalltalk-80 systems, and VLSI systems. ... Read more

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Blondie24 tells the story of a computer that taught itself to play checkers far better than its creators ever could by using a program that emulated the basic principles of Darwinian evolution--random variation and natural selection-- to discover on its own how to excel at the game.

Unlike Deep Blue, the celebrated chess machine that beat Garry Kasparov, the former world champion chess player, this evolutionary program didn't have access to strategies employed by human grand masters, or to databases of moves for the endgame moves, or to other human expertise about the game of chekers. With only the most rudimentary information programmed into its "brain," Blondie24 (the program's Internet username) created its own means of evaluating the complex, changing patterns of pieces that make up a checkers game by evolving artificial neural networks---mathematical models that loosely describe how a brain works.

It's fitting that Blondie24 should appear in 2001, the yearwhen we remember Arthur C. Clarke's prediction that one day we would succeed in creating a thinking machine.In this compelling narrative, David Fogel, author and co-creator of Blondie24, describes in convincing detail how evolutionary computation may help to bring us closer to Clarke's vision of HAL.Along the way, he gives readers an inside look into the fascinating history of AI and poses provocative questions about its future.

* Brings one of the most exciting areas of AI research to life by following the story of Blondie24's development in the lab through her evolution into an expert-rated checkers player, based on her impressive success in Internet competition.
* Explains the foundations of evolutionary computation, simply and clearly.
* Presents complex material in an engaging style for readers with no background in computer science or artificial intelligence.
* Examines foundational issues surrounding the creation of a thinking machine.
* Debates whether the famous Turing Test really tests for intelligence.
* Challenges deeply entrenched myths about the successes and implication of some well-known AI experiments
* Shows Blondie's moves with checkerboard diagrams that readers can easily follow.Amazon.com Review
What must it do to the human male ego to find out that the young woman who just handily won an online game of checkers is actually a sleek piece of software with no real understanding of the game's rules? Evolutionary programmers David B. Fogel and Kumar Chellapilla learned this and many other lessons in their quest to build a problem-solver divorced from human expertise. Fogel's book Blondie24: Playing at the Edge of AI captures their spirit of good-natured questioning of the received wisdom of traditional checkers playing and AI research.

The writing is surprisingly engaging, coming from a software researcher; even readers with little interest in checkers will follow Fogel's many game analyses with rising interest as his neural networks increase in prowess. Ever the scientist, he includes a laundry list of fairly harsh critiques of his work--with rebuttals--as an appendix. Devotees of cutting-edge AI, online psychology, or tournament-level checkers will find plenty of interest in the exploits of Blondie24. --Rob Lightner ... Read more

Customer Reviews (37)

Interesting, but flawed...
Blondie24 is an interesting book regarding an attempt to use evolutionary computation to create a strong checkers player. It's actually quite interesting as a social experiment: in order to get more people to play against the program, it adopted the persona of a young flirtatious woman.When it adopted a more standard persona, other players (one imagines mostly men) would simply quit when they got behind.

If the book overall has a failing its that in the end, it is that Blondie really doesn't illustrate much of an understanding of checkers. Yes, it will probably play checkers well enough to beat 90% of humans, but it won't beat any reasonable humans, or even the most modest attempts at writing a serious checkers program.And more than that, the book doesn't really convey any of the truly interesting features of Checkers or the long history of human play. Blondie24 is worth reading, but do youself a favor and read Schaeffer's One Leap Ahead first. And then read it again after.You'll get a lot deeper insight into checkers play.

Needs more AI and less checkers
This is a well written and entertaining book about the author's quest to use neural networks to "teach" a computer how to play checkers. What makes the author's efforts unique is his steadfast refusal to use "human" knowledge in the design or development of the software. Instead his approach is to infuse the software with only the basic mechanics of the game. He then uses neural networks and pits various mutations against each other with only the strongest advancing to the next round. By mimicking the process of natural selection, the author is able to evolve a program that is able to play checkers at a surprisingly high level.

My one criticism of the book is that too much page space is dedicated to describing the intricacies of the various matches. I imagine the readers to be only superficially interested in the actual checkers components of the book and more interested in the AI mechanics. Some of the page space which the author devotes to match description could have been more profitably used to describe the detail behind the neural networks. The author does give descriptive overviews of the process but details of the algorithms themselves are rather scant.

Interesting 20k foot view of GA and NN application
This book is an interesting (i.e. light, not too technical) introduction to Genetic Algorithms, Neural Networks, and potential applications of both.The book covers an appropriate amount of history, and a pretty extensive set of notes for those that care to dive deeper.The core of the story is about applying GA and NN to the game of checkers and creating a computer program (NN) that can play checkers without any pre-learned (human) knowledge about how "best" to play the game.

Overall it was a good read.The author argues that the current exmaples of AI success (e.g. DeepBlue in chess) are actually failures as they are brute-force solutions to specific problems with no true "learning" taking place.I would agree, but am also not sure that NN+GA represent "learning" either.They are another method for searching a solution space [in my VERY simple/humble opinion].All the "learning" happens through solution mutation from generation to generation.Once the mutation/generation process is halted the "learning" also stops.

Anyway, worth the read if you are interested in NN and/or GA, but not already well-educated on the topics.

Great book, Great program
I've read Blondie24 more than twice. It's a great and inspirational book about what the future of artificial intelligence is going to be like when computers teach themselves how to figure things out. I was prompted to write here because of a review claiming that Blondie24's playing strength is exaggerated in the book and that it is based only on the ratings of people on a checkers website. On the contrary, the book is straight and upfront about the playing capability of the program. Blondie24 is a great story about how David Fogel and Kumar Chellapilla created a program that learned how to play checkers using very little checkers information. Like, where are the pieces, and what are they. The program learned by playing against itself. Blondie made it to the top 500 of people rated on www.zone.com, but Fogel didn't stop there and claim that Blondie was an expert. Instead, he competed Blondie against a version of Chinook, the world champion program, that played at the expert (so-called "novice") level and won 2, lost 4, and drew 4 games with it. Coincidently, Blondie24's rating after those 10 games was about the same as it was on the website (an expert level). Chinook's web site has a "hall of fame" of people who have beat it at this level. Fogel's name is on that list because Blondie24 beat it. (Probably it should be Blondie24's name on the list.) Funny thing is that Fogel treated the objection about ratings on [...] directly in the book. It's "Objection #12" in the objections section on pages 315-317.

Not only did Blondie24 advance from being basically a random player into playing at the level of experts (but not masters or grand masters, and Fogel never claimed that it was a master), it achieved this without using an endgame database of moves or opening book moves. Imagine how good the combination of human knowledge and Blondie24 could be. I understand that Fogel and others have now moved on to learning in chess, achieving results that are at the grand master level.

Good Book, Bad Program
Dr. Fogel did serious work in a true scientific manner, and the book is just fine, but potential readers should be aware that the playing strength of Blondie24 is greatly exaggerated.While it will beat the average checker player, that is no accomplishment; and to say it is an "expert" or "master" player based on ratings at some of the larger on-line sites means almost nothing.

In testing against other checker playing computer programs Blondie24 is completely undistinguished and cannot play an even match with any sort of serious checker program.

This points to the fallacy of the implied premise of the book.In fully deterministic games, neural networks to date have been a remarkable failure.In probabalistic games such as Backgammon, on the other hand, they have been an incredible success, as the world's top Backgammon programs are based on neural nets.

But there is all the difference in the world between a probabalistic game and a deterministic one and I don't believe the book "comes clean" on this. ... Read more

Product Description

This book constitutes the refereed post-proceedings of the 13^th International Conference on AI, Simulation, and Planning in High Autonomy Systems, AIS 2004, held in Jeju Island, Korea in October 2004.

The 74 revised full papers presented together with 2 invited keynote papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 170 submissions; after the conference, the papers went through another round of revision. The papers are organized in topical sections on modeling and simulation methodologies, intelligent control, computer and network security, HLA and simulator interoperation, manufacturing, agent-based modeling, DEVS modeling and simulation, parallel and distributed modeling and simulation, mobile computer networks, Web-based simulation and natural systems, modeling and simulation environments, AI and simulation, component-based modeling, watermarking and semantics, graphics, visualization and animation, and business modeling.

Product Description
This innovative text presents the first full integration of object-oriented programming and the principles of artificial intelligence, using the popular language C++ as the medium to implement object-oriented designs. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

Poor code but good research material
I agree with the reviews about the code problems but if you go to the website of this book you can get corrected code, samples and errors found.You cannot find a bunch of books in this field of object oriented artificial intelligence so I considered to be a unique.Of course a WIP but a valid foundation, it works.

Don't waste your money
This was the main text whilst studying AI for my final year, and the instructors had a damn near riot on their hands from myself and my fellow undergrads. Even the seminar leaders were remarking on how 'Damn awful,horribly messy, downright nasty' the code was. This book conveyed preciouslittle useful information in the main. I think my university will very soonfind another text for AI in c++, or go back to teaching lisp.

I'm surethe authors are good at AI, but one thing they aren't good at is writingbooks. Stick to what you know, guys.

One previous reviewer commented hewould to award minus stars - can I make a request for minus to infinity? Yes, it is THAT poor.

An interesting attempt on the theme ( OOP IS REAL AI).
For Instructors for course in AI: I have tried to use it as main referrence for a master level course in AI. It can onlybe a support book. It gives a lot of interesting exercises; an overview of all the topics. Inimportant contexts it is too sketchy; But the metaphor ` OOP IS REAL AI' isa questionable position. It is not established in the book. For Instructorsfor course in OOP: I used the book for defining a group projects for anundergraduate course. Majority of students picked interest in theirrespective AI themes. Two groups reported that the downloaded code could berun with some small modifications. Other gruops had trobule in making thecode run. The exercises defined in the chapters gave easy motivationalcontexts for the students. Some observations: The chapter 6 on Logic shouldhave been more comprehensive to discuss the theorem prover ( whichpresented in sec 9.6). In OOP point of view, the chapter on KnowledgeRepresentation was ideal, it worked for the group which worked SemanticNetworks. The key need is that the auther should have explained betterabout the way the code is constructed in the chapter on heuristic search.It will be interesting if the authors showhow the case study InteractiveIntelligent Kitchen helper as discussed by Timothy Budd is implemented inthe framework developed by Kim Tracy and P.Bouthoorn.

Readable, comprehensive and intuitive
The book is intuitive for researchers.The content is coherently organised.

Poorly written code wastes pages
The authors didn't take the time to learn proper C++ programming before writing this book.There are lots of mistakes (even taking into account the time when this was written, there was no ANSI C++ standard...it isstill bad C++ code). The book does a very poor job of describing how to usethe object constructs to program agents. The examples are also very poorlydesigned.Many of the questions ask you to implement algorithm in languageX, then in language Y.A book devoted to one language (as specified in thetitle) should solidly focus on the implementation of that language for thetopic.I would give this book negative stars, but amazon doesn't allowthat...yet.

Save your money.There are better AI books. ... Read more

Product Description
The increased sophistication and availability of massively parallelsupercomputers has had two major impacts on research in artificialintelligence, both of which are addressed in this collection of excitingnew AI theories and experiments. Massively parallel computers have beenused to push forward research in traditional AI topics such as vision,search, and speech. More important, these machines allow AI to expand inexciting new ways by taking advantage of research in neuroscience anddeveloping new models and paradigms, among them associate memory, neuralnetworks, genetic algorithms, artificial life, society-of-mind models,and subsumption architectures. A number of chapters show that massivelyparallel computing enables AI researchers to handle significantly largeramounts of data in real time, which changes the way that AI systems canbe built, which in turn makes memory-based reasoning and neural-network-based vision systems become practical. Other chapters presentthe contrasting view that massively parallel computing provides aplatform to model and build intelligent systems by simulating the(massively parallel) processes that occur in nature. Additionalinformation on Massively Parallel Artificial Intelligence ... Read more

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A fascinating portrait of the people, programs, and ideas that have driven the search to create thinking machines. Rich with anecdotes about the founders and leaders and their celebrated feuds and intellectual gamesmanship, AI chronicles their dramatic successes and failures and discusses the next nece ssary breakthrough: teaching computers "common sense".Amazon.com Review
Perhaps no venture in the history of computing has produced somany high hopes and attracted so many brilliant minds, yet produced somany daunting failures as the quest for artificial intelligence.Daniel Crevier' fascinating and deeply researched history of theAI traces the search for machine intelligence from theoptimistic first experiments of the mid 1950s, through the classicprojects of the next two decades, on to the mixed fortunes of thecommercial AI ventures that began in the 1980s. In addition to being ahistory of an intellectual field, it's a portrait gallery of thebrilliant and often eccentric people who built it. Crevier'sdiscussion does not demand a programming background, yet takes thereader deeply into theoretical issues that make us ponder thephenomenon of human intelligence. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Excellent introduction to artificial intelligence.
It's a great pity that this book is out of print. Daniel Crevier has written an excellent history of AI, which is also insightful in its analysis of the field. It is that rare creature in AI literature, somethingthat is written clearly and objectively for the layperson, but that alsoconveys the complexity of AI. AI would find a lot more use in ourworkplaces and homes than it already has, if more people would communicateits strengths and weaknesses as lucidly as Daniel Crevier, and focus on itspractical applications rather than speculating on spiritual machines. Hewould do a great service to the field to bring it up to date and have itrepublished.

AI: The search continues
AI Tells the bumpy story of the search for artificial intellegence from the eyes of the people who were there. The stories start in the 1950's and include present day research. It is well written and captures the reader with a touch of philosophy, asking such questions as "are computers really smart?"

Wonderful book on a much misunderstood subject.
I thought this was a great book on Artificial Intelligence.It would be a good book for anyone interested in the subject at all because it is written in a way to give just enough technical detail for the enthusiast, while keeping the casual reader interested.The author does a very commendable job in his interpretation of the history of this subject.He uses personal experience as well as good research on the subject to give us a great story as well as the cold hard facts.

An amusing history of this much-maligned topic
As this book demonstrates, you can learn a lot from what doesn't work. The history and politics of AI are as interesting as its successes and failures to date. There's not a lot of technical detail here, but the author does manage to weave the thread of a pretty good story through this history. ... Read more

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The transition from sequential to parallel computation is an area of critical concern in today's computer technology, particularly in architecture, programming languages, systems, and artificial intelligence. This book addresses central issues in concurrency, and by producing both a syntactic definition and a denotational model of Hewitt's actor paradigm—a model of computation specifically aimed at constructing and analyzing distributed large-scale parallel systems—it substantially advances the understanding of parallel computation.

Contents: Introduction. General Design Decisions. Computation in ACTOR Systems. A More Expressive Language. A Model for ACTOR Systems. Concurrency Issues. Abstraction and Compositionality. Conclusions. ... Read more

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Rules of Encounter applies the general approach and the mathematicaltools of game theory in a formal analysis of rules (or protocols)governing the high-level behavior of interacting heterogeneous computersystems. It describes a theory of high-level protocol design that can beused to constrain manipulation and harness the potential of automatednegotiation and coordination strategies to attain more effectiveinteraction among machines that have been programmed by differententities to pursue different goals. While game theoretic ideas have beenused to answer the question of how a computer should be programmed toact in a given specific interaction, here they are used in a new way, toaddress the question of how to design the rules of interactionthemselves for automated agents. Rules of Encounter provides a unified,coherent account of machine interaction at the level of the machinedesigners (the society of designers) and the level of the machineinteraction itself (the resulting artificial society). Taking intoaccount such attributes of the artificial society as efficiency, and theself-interest of each member in the society of designers, it analyzeswhat kinds of rules should be instituted to govern interaction amongthese autonomous agents. The authors point out that adjusting the rulesof public behavior -- or the rules of the game -- by which the programsmust interact can influence the private strategies that designers set upin their machines, shaping design choices and run-time behavior, as wellas social behavior. Artificial Intelligence series ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Great comprehensive introduction!
We used this book for a month for a course in distributed AI. This books provides a comprehensible structure to multiagent negotiations by identifying three different kinds of domains (task oriented, stateoriented, and worth oriented), and describe negotiation protocols and givetheir important properties. Wherever needed, the authors make theconnection to game theory. This is a solid base to recent papers and bookson multiagent negotiations, and also to build your own MAS usingnegotiation protocols of varying levels of complexities.

Great comprehensive introduction!
We used this book for a month for a course in distributed AI. This books provide a comprehensible structure to multiagent negotiations by identifying three different kinds of domains (task oriented, stateoriented, and worth oriented), and describe negotiation protocols and givetheir important properties. Wherever needed, the authors make theconnection to game theory. This is a solid base to recent papers and bookson multiagent negotiations, and also to build your own MAS usingnegotiation protocols of varying levels of complexities. ... Read more

Product Description
Cognition and artificial intelligence are entering a new era in which the aspects of symbolic manipulation and of connectionism begin to come together. This leads to a dialog of truly interdisciplinary character. The book covers aspects of fuzzy logic, case based reasoning, learning as well as meaning, language, and consciousness. The authors of this topical volume have their background in logic, computer science, physics and mathematics, philosophy, psychology and neurobiology. ... Read more