Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach introduces basic ideas in artificial intelligence from the perspective of building intelligent agents, which the authors define as "anything that can be viewed as perceiving its environment through sensors and acting upon the environment through effectors." This textbook is up-to-date and is organized using the latest principles of good textbook design. It includes historical notes at the end of every chapter, exercises, margin notes, a bibliography, and a competent index.
Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach is divided into seven parts with a total of 27 chapters. The authors state that it is a large text which would take two semesters to cover all the chapters and projects.
- Part I: Artificial Intelligence - Sets the stage for the following sections by viewing AI systems as intelligent agents that can decide what actions to take and when to take them.
- Part II: Problem Solving - Focuses on methods for deciding what action to take when needing to think several steps ahead such as playing a game of chess.
- Part III: Knowledge and Reasoning - Discusses ways to represent knowledge about the intelligent agents' environment and how to reason logically with that knowledge.
- Part IV: Acting logically - Focuses on Planning, Practical Planning, Planning and Acting.
- Part V: Uncertain Knowledge and Reasoning - This section deals with reasoning and decision-making in the presence of uncertainty in the environment.
- Part VI: Learning - Describes ways for generating knowledge required by the decision-making components and introduces a new component the neural network.
- Part VII: Communicating, Perceiving and Acting - Concentrates on ways an intelligent agent can perceive its environment whether by touch or vision.
- Part VIII: Conclusions - Considers the past and future of AI by discussing what AI really is and why it has succeeded to some degree. Also the views of those philosophers who believe that AI can never succeed are given discussion.
