Introduction to artificial intelligence. Translated from the German by Nathanael T. Black. With illustrations by Florian Mast (Q6549534)

The book under review, at its third edition, is a fundamental textbook overviewing essential concepts needed as a starting point for artificial intelligence teaching and research. The book comprises eleven chapters; following an introductory chapter presenting the history of AI and its role within modern society, the author details elements of propositional logic (Chapter 2) and first-order predicate logic (Chapter 3), and states known limitations of logic (Chapter 4), focusing on the search space problem, on decidability and incompleteness, and approaches for modelling uncertainty. In Chapter 5, basic concepts of PROLOG are discussed. Next, Chapters 6 and 7 focus on search problems (Chapter 6) and uninformed and heuristic approaches, and on reasoning with uncertainty (Chapter 7), built on tactics for computing with probabilities and the principle of maximum entropy.\N\NIn Chapter 8 the author overviews classical machine learning approaches, spanning supervised learning (the perceptron, k-nearest neighbour methods, decision tree learning) and unsupervised learning (clustering). Chapter 9 expands on the concepts related to neural networks, detailing Hopfield networks and Neural associative memory. The textbook concludes with a chapter on reinforcement learning (Chapter 10) that describes in detail the task and uninformed combinatorial search, while also proposing as strategies A-learning, Q-learning and the exploration vs exploitation angle.\N\NThe textbook benefits from numerous examples; summaries and exercises conclude every chapter; solutions and hints for all exercises are presented in Chapter 11. Also included are extensive references, which represent a reliable starting point for the wide audience, from students to researchers, who would benefit from the structured overview of these fundamental theoretical aspects.\N\NSee also the review of the first edition in [Zbl 1238.68002]. For the second edition see [Zbl 1402.68002]. For the original German editions see [Zbl 1129.68054; Zbl 1178.68388]