ABOUT THE BOOK Modern Concepts in Artificial Intelligence is primarily intended for use in an undergraduate course.

Due to its comprehensive coverage and a number of detailed algorithms, it is useful as a primary reference volume for Artificial Intelligence (AI) graduate students and professionals wishing to branch out beyond their own subfield. The only prerequisite is familiarity with basic concepts of computer science (algorithms, data structures, complexity, etc.) at a sophomore level. AI is a big field; in this book the main unifying theme is the idea of intelligent agents and how such agents implement a function that maps percept sequences to actions. The book is divided into eight chapters. Chapter one which introduces the course offers an overview of AI and traces the history from the gestation through the emergence of intelligent agents. Chapter two centred on intelligent agents: systems that can decide what to do and then do it, compares the two approacheshuman centred and rationalist- in determining the intelligence of an intelligent agent, classes of intelligent agents and properties of task environment. Chapter three focuses on the essential concepts of expert systems and knowledge engineering as it relates to AI while chapter four considers the commonly used programming languages for AI: Prolog and Lisp; stating the basic concepts and essentials of programming through the use of carefully chosen sample programs. The description of that part of intelligent agent responsible for reaching decisions, ways to represent knowledge about the world, how to reason logically with that knowledge; examining the fundamental concepts of logical representation and reasoning, and propositional logic- a stepping-stone to first-order logic- are presented in chapter five while chapter six deals with fundamental concepts, methods and algorithms of constraint satisfaction problems. Chapter seven covers natural language processing. The book ends with genetic programming, which compares the attributes of genetic programming to other approaches in AI.