Artificial Intelligence Books

Fuzzy logic results from probable classifications. Fuzzy logic is about classification. Words are used to build context. Machines must follow rules that humans find intuitive. For example what is an oval. A person can be shown a few examples of an oval and know instinctive which shapes are oval. Fuzzy rules, such as, convex, continueous, closed, etc, probabilities must pattern match to product an action that confirms the object is oval.

Mycin is an expert system with both an inference engine and a knowledge base engine. Mycin uses a fuzzy logic inference engine and derives a best solution through a series of questions and answers. In the 1970's Mycin was used to advise physicians on the treatment of bacterial infections of the blood and meningitis. Mycin uses information about specific symptons and the outcomes of laboratory tests then recommends a certain course of antibotics. The system outputs sentences but the user inputs words. Mycin asks facts about a specific patient. The inference engine has a series of rules and each rule has an action. When a rule is activated the pattern part matches the database. If a pattern match occurs an action results. More questions can result from actions, a backward chaining expert system.

I enjoyed the approach here. The author uses simple, rather concrete examples that allow one to see how fuzzy logic systems work. With the shareware given here it also shows that such systems don't take a lot to construct or work with. As one reviewer says the book doesn't have much on the mathematical theory behind fuzzy logic systems, but the author meants such as a practical approach. And the mathematical theory definitely works as much too much to explain in a work like this. Additionally, the main advantage of using fuzzy systems works as that you don't have to use so much math and bury everything in equations and cryptic symbols. This sort of example makes it easier to see this and work with it.
The knowledge builder shows some ideas as to how one can generate if-then rules in a simple fashion. The decision maker makes the program practically. And the fuzzy cognitive map shows you how fuzzy logic systems can apply to scientific modeling easily.

Not a bad intro to Fuzzy if you know nothing about it and the few real world examples showed me that Fuzzy Logic can be used successfully. But the work the authors have you do with the shareware is too difficult to follow. The results often didn't match up to the book's section and i was left confused. This book is very light in fuzzy theory and left me without knowing how to use fuzzy logic in the real world.

If you're interested in an overview of the subject of fuzzy logic this book may be adequate for your need. It is primarily a manual on how to use the shareware version of the software which is provided. I found this book inadequate in explaining the theory behind fuzzy logic

Adami's book is the first comprehensive review of issues pertinent to the field of artificial life. The book is a textbook based on his lectures at CalTech. Some of the topics are a bit brief (Turing machines are summarized in four pages) but that is to be expected for a book whose goal is to integrate concepts from the fields of biology, chemistry, statistics, computer science, information science, etc. I found the book fascinating and Chris includes a CD-rom and several chapters on the Avida simulation developed at CalTech. There are numerous references and problems at the end of each chapter.

This is the ONLY book I have seen which brings together all the many and various strands which are essential to the exciting new subjects arising currently around the question: What is Life? It is a stunning tour de force of the basic knowledge you need to possess to work in the areas of A-life or biological complexity.

I should warn: it's not a book I could read through in an afternoon, by any means. At times the descriptions are a little cryptic, so that I had to work at understanding what was being said. But the effort I had to put in was always rewarded with greater understanding. Thank you, Chris Adami.

I bought this book to understand the mathematics and physics in A-Life and Complexity. Instead I found this book very long winded and difficult to comprehend exactly what was trying to be said. The content and layout of the book is great, just wish a better writer had been the author of this book. Lots of fancy, big words that are not needed to get the basic points across. Very hard to understand what is being said. It takes smarts and skill to explain complicated, abstract ideas in a meaningful manner. This book does not do that. I wish it did!

Adami demonstrates how to use the tools of artificial life to conduct pure scientific research. A very clear and readable textbook on the subject, Adami makes me want to go back to graduate school. Here is a chance to take an introductory course in an exciting field of research that is truely table-top science. I loved the book and I didn't even use the CD and software that came with it.

Reviewed by Vicky Burkholder
on 07/13/2008

I said in a review of a different anthology that reviewing an anthology of short stories has to be one of the hardest things a reviewer can do, especially if the stories are all written by different authors. My previous statement holds true. Some of the authors in this anthology include S. Andrew Swann, Brendan Dubois, Loren Coleman, Rick Hautala, Bill Fawcett, Ed Gorman, William Keith, and more.

In this book, we are given fifteen different stories by fifteen different authors but with one theme uniting them all: man vs. machine. This book is hard science fiction. There are no feel-good, warm fuzzies here. These stories explore the questions of technology and our future - what happens if technology becomes too big, or if it dies. Like all anthologies, there were some stories I liked, some I didn't care much for, but not because of the writing. Each story is well crafted and well-written. Overall, the tales were very good.

If you don't have a lot of time to read, anthologies are a good place to go. Each story is complete and is good for a quick read when you don't have time for a novel. If you liked the Terminator movies, you'll love these stories. They're a must read for the hard science fiction reader.

This book has the problem that many theme anthologies do: the prime criterion is the theme, not the quality of the story, and many (most) of the stories feel dashed-off, cookie-press, run-of-the-mill. None of them are awful, but of the 15 the only one I really enjoyed was S. Andrew Swann's "The Historian's Apprentice" (and even that one had the obvious ending: I enjoyed it for the setting more than the narrative).

Pretty much without exception these are unchallenging reiterations of themes that have been used so often you can see right through them; seldom do they rise above cliche. Maybe I'm just jaded, but Booklist's "fresh and sometimes brilliant" just says to me that they're real easy graders over there...

The premise hooked this reviewer who has always been fascinated by technology especially artificial intelligence since reading an early Fantastic 4 comic book involving Galactus first coming to dine on planet earth; enhanced by the real first Star Wars; and as John Helfers mentions in the Introduction the Terminator thrillers. Thus my bias is evident. To the credit of the contributors each of the tales is well written using varying approaches to the underlying theme of MAN VS. MACHINE. For instance "The Historian's Apprentice" by S. Andrew Swann looks back to how we got into the mess we are in today while the "Last of the Fourth" by Bill Fawcett focuses on military sci fi as machine and man battle for supremacy. Each of the fifteen new short stories are fun to read as we have come a long way baby since "Sarah Connor versus a killer robot from the future" as affirmed by this strong anthology.

Harriet Klausner

Ok, I have to admit, when I purchased this anthology, I did it for two reasons. One is that I am a huge fan of Daw anthologies and I try to read them all. The second, is I was intrigued by the topic of Man Vs Machine, and I'm a fan of the Terminator movies (Yes, even T3) so there you go. I knew that with Daw's eclectic group of contributors, not all the stories would follow the same old Terminator formula... and there were a wide variety of stories. A full list of the stories and the authors follow.

**Servant of Death by Jane Lindskold and Fred Saberhagen **The Unplug War by Brendan DuBois **Cold Dead Fingers by Loren L Coleman **The Hum by Rick Hautala **The Last of the Fourth by Bill Fawcett **Moral Imperative by Ed Gorman **Partnership by William H. Keith **Chasing Humanity by Bradley P. Beaulieu **The Difference by L.E. Modesitt, Jr. **Transformation by Stephen Leigh **Killer App by Richard Dansky **Reiteration by Simon Brown **Stalking Old John Bull by Jean Rabe **Engines of Desire & Despair by Russel Davis & **The Historian's Apprentice by S. Andrew Swann.

I don't know what it is about the stories, or it might have been me. Maybe I just wasn't in the mood for what I was reading, and honestly, if I could give the anthology 3.5 stars I would. I just erred on the side of giving more because stories like Servant of Death are powerful, and Stalking Old John Bull stretched the theme of the anthology to the breaking point, but it was good. Many of the stories in this were less than stellar, at least in my eyes. None of them really have the "Terminator" flavor and perhaps my looking for something like that just slanted me too much. Maybe it's the fact that most of the science fiction of these stories is not hard or soft sci-fi... it's somewhere in the middle... and I wasn't quite looking for that, either.

Over all, it's not a terrible anthology, I have yet to meet a terrible Daw anthology. I would recommend it for a plane ride or a vacation, as long as no one makes my mistake and thinks they'll find one type of Man Vs Machine story... Daw is too evolved for that.

Recommended, especially for Sci-Fi fans looking for a good vacation book.

Top-level robotics research involves many disciplines: kinematics, dynamics, control, and programming. A growing number of researchers see the key to unifying these diverse fields in robot algorithms -mathematical descriptions linking perception and motion that can operate in the real world to achieve goals. This collection features articles by top-level scientists in theoretical computer science, computational geometry, robotics, perception, artificial intelligence, and mechanical engineering. They present robotics as a field of computation applied to the real world much more than just controlling robot arms! A very technical collection valuable to both researchers and students.

Top-level robotics research involves many disciplines: kinematics, dynamics, control, and programming. A growing number of researchers see the key to unifying these diverse fields in robot algorithms -mathematical descriptions linking perception and motion that can operate in the real world to achieve goals. This collection features articles by top-level scientists in theoretical computer science, computational geometry, robotics, perception, artificial intelligence, and mechanical engineering. They present robotics as a field of computation applied to the real world much more than just controlling robot arms! A very technical collection valuable to both researchers and students.

Top-level robotics research involves many disciplines: kinematics, dynamics, control, and programming. A growing number of researchers see the key to unifying these diverse fields in robot algorithms -mathematical descriptions linking perception and motion that can operate in the real world to achieve goals. This collection features articles by top-level scientists in theoretical computer science, computational geometry, robotics, perception, artificial intelligence, and mechanical engineering. They present robotics as a field of computation applied to the real world much more than just controlling robot arms! A very technical collection valuable to both researchers and students.

I have been fascinated with AI for a long time, so I was excited to see this book. I own 3 other AI books, and all of them are really good. This book explains things in a way that is easy to understand. The author doesn't use any C++ in the book every algorithm is done in pseudo-code to make it easy to implement using any language. It is a definitive guide to the basic and not so basic AI techniques. The aicore that the author provides on the CD is well documented and is very helpful.

The book covers:
Steering behaviors
Pathfinding
Decision Making
State Machines
Fuzzy Logic
Waypoints
Learning Behaviors
Communication
Teaching characters

And a break down of how a typical AI design is done in different types of games.

Just to give you a notion I am about 12 hours into this book. So I may add or change this as I get further along, but overall this is a must have book.

There are a few things that I personally don't like. One is no .exe are on the cd so everything has to be built. This is a new book, so maybe the author will build them and place them on his website. I would also like to see some solutions for Visual Studio on the cd. The author says several times he tries and makes the code as platform independent as possible, but It would be nice to have prebuilt .exe files at least so I can see the demo's in action.

Understand that the pseudo-code approach this book takes is what makes it such a standout from the rest of the crowd. The author is technically thorough and the syntax is straightforward enough to use in any language needed. Moreover, it frees the author to discuss AI in abstract terms which, in the end, proves to be much more valuable content. C++ source code puts the pseudo-code discussions into practice for those looking for real-world examples.

I would HIGHLY recommend this book as a follow up to Mat Buckland's "Programming Game AI by Example" (Nov., 2004)

The author uses "pseudo-code" through out the book. The cd contains only a pc-executable program. There is no source code on the CD.

This book is a poor source of programming code where the author explains how ai works based on the pseudo-code.

If you're looking for source code (ie C++ source code) you'll not find it here.

Although containing example code in Common Lisp, the Common Lisp is of Steele's 1st edition variety, (NOT 2nd. edition). Logical symbolic processing employing manipulation of some truth maintenence systems and nets is informative.

Although containing example code in Common Lisp, the Common Lisp is of Steele's 1st edition variety, (NOT 2nd. edition). Logical symbolic processing employing manipulation of some truth maintenence systems and nets is informative.
Re-enter Amazon's welcome screen, choose Books, choose Extended-Search, search by
"Charniak" author and "Artificial Intelligence Programming" title to order this book.

Although containing example code in Common Lisp, the Common Lisp is of Steele's 1st edition variety, (NOT 2nd. edition). Logical symbolic processing employing manipulation of some truth maintenence systems and nets is informative.

This is one of what I see as an emerging series of books aimed at delving into the management and operations of CI professionals and CI units. For the past two decades, the vast volume of published books have focused on what CI is, what it can do, how to do data collection better, how to improve analytical techniques, etc. Now we have a book, written just for the CI professional, as well as the IT manager, on how to select the right kind of software for a CI unit.

Our editor, Bonnie Hohhof, wisely suggested that I compare the approach here with that in a recent issue of CIM, Robert Chamberlain and Ho Davies, "A Framework for Evaluation CI Technologies" (vol. 6:2, March/April 2003). For those that do not recall that piece, the authors sought to build and then apply a "simple, easy-to-use" framework to help CI managers evaluate competing technologies. It presumes that the readers understand what CI is, and how it operates. From there, they use a four-step approach to produce an evaluation framework.

Assessing Competitive Intelligence Software adopts a similar approach, but drives much deeper into the issues. First, it starts by analyzing the various systems currently in use by IT professionals to compare software for business applications. From them, it develops a composite system that they can apply to CI software.

Then, they turn to the CI process. Relying on some of the key works and authors on modern CI, they, in essence, deconstruct CI to lay bare its internal workings. From that, they then develop an information-processing model of the CI cycle. That model alone (p. 43) is an important addition to the understanding of the CI process, and one to which I would draw the attention of those teaching CI at the college and higher levels.

Returning to the world of information processing, the authors identify and then explain the value-added processes in CI. They conclude by listing all of the separate criteria that make up their evaluation criteria process. (pp. 115 et seq.). If the book stopped here, it would be an important acquisition for the CI and IT manager. But the book then takes these analytical frameworks and applies them to several existing, identified, software packages. While they conclude that "it is fair to state the CI software has not yet delivered what the manufacturers claim." the authors are not negative. They clearly believe that better software is being developed every day, and have provided a disciplined and thorough way for the CI manager, working with the IT professional, to select among today and tomorrow's software options.

Written by John McGonagle, book reviewer for Competitive Intelligence Magazine. Review excerpted from the November/December issue, published by SCIP www.scip.org

Librarians and any involved in commercial software products for competitive intelligence will find this collection of reviews and surveys to be an exceptional guide presenting a systematic method businesses and collections can use to evaluate CI software independently. This could have been reviewed in our business books section but also holds applicability to librarians and others involved in the information technology industry, providing an important background on competitive intelligence applications and methodology.

It is now perhaps a cliche to say that the nature of business has changed. With the rise of the Internet, increased globalization, and advances in financial engineering, both large and small companies have to keep abreast of trends at shorter and shorter time scales. The volatility of the marketplace has sent the business environment into a roller coaster ride of confidence and anxiety, and so it is imperative that sophisticated tools be brought in to handle gigantic market swings. These tools can take the form of software, and go by the name of competitive intelligence (CI). The goal of this book is to evaluate this software based on certain criteria that the authors think is important. It is one of the first books on the evaluation of competitive intelligence software, and is successful in cutting through the advertising hype that frequently accompanies this software.

Competitive intelligence for the authors is a process that involves using publicly available information in order to learn various things about competitor, and to understand this information thoroughly. They assert, correctly, that the information that is gained must be transformed in order to make it useful for decision making and to induce changes or actions in a particular company.

In chapter 1, the authors attempt to clarify the meaning of "value-added information" in the use of CI. One would think that this would be a difficult notion to clarify, and this is certainly correct. The authors approach the problem by attempting to define just what "information" and "intelligence" are, as well as "data" and "knowledge". Such definitions could be deep and might degenerate into philosophical discussion, but the authors do a fairly good job of keeping the discussion relatively concrete. This discussion leads them to distinguish between the roles played by information specialists, CI professionals, and experts. An information specialist acquires access to information resources, CI practitioners assign values to its content, and experts decide the action to be taken. The authors though recognize that the boundaries between these roles can be blurred. After a modest review of the literature, the authors assert that value-added processes are ones that offer the means to see the potential of information and to relate it to problems in specific environments.

The authors attempt to construct a conceptual framework for CI in chapter 2, after giving a literature survey of attempts to do so. As expected, the laissez faire nature of industry in the US made the nature of its CI very different from the CI of Japan or Europe. The authors are careful to distinguish between CI and "industrial spying", and clarify the difference between it and business and marketing intelligence. Different analytical techniques, such as personality profiling and scenario development, are discussed in terms of their ability to guide information requirements. In addition, they emphasize the need for reliable filtering mechanisms that will eliminate false information about a competitor. The most interesting discussion in this chapter concerns the analysis of the obtained information, for this is where techniques from artificial intelligence could be used. Such techniques are not discussed in the book, but the authors do summarize the eight most popular analysis techniques for CI.

In chapter 3, the authors begin their evaluation of CI software, with the main goal being to find out whether it can allow users to achieve their intended goals. Their evaluation criteria are aimed at identifying the value-added processes that should take place when a CI application is used to transform information into intelligence. The authors stress early on that CI software needs to be evaluated beyond the "recall" and "precision" criteria used to evaluate information retrieval systems. The dynamical nature of competitive information is the main reason for this, as typical databases are not refreshed at short enough time scales. CI systems also must assist in the analysis of information, not merely retrieve it. The value-added framework of R.S. Taylor, one of the early CI specialists, is used throughout this chapter, and the rest of the book, to evaluate CI software. Based on the Taylor model, the author presents 38 criteria for evaluating CI software, and discuss them in fair detail. One of these criteria is particularly interesting, in that it involves "closeness to the problem", a very difficult concept to quantify, but one which is also very important in other fields, such as artificial intelligence. And, by the way, the use of artificial intelligence will soften the need for a "sixth sense" that the authors mention is a necessary ability for CI specialists to have in order to analyze information. Indeed, recent advances in natural language "paraphrasing" will be of enormous importance in the need for summarizing acquired information.

Finally, in chapter 4, the authors begin evaluating the software packages available for CI. The authors list three selection criteria for distinguishing CI from other types of software, and six applications that meet these criteria. In chapter 5 the authors present a set of equations to allow more rigorous evaluation of CI software. Their goal was to compare these packages relative to their information-processing capability, and not rank them. It is readily apparent when reading this chapter that the authors took great care in their evaluation of the packages, which certainly must have been a time-consuming effort. Many problems shared by all the packages are discussed, including their lack of tools for monitoring the relevance of content through time, the lack of mechanisms for filtering information, and the poor performance of the packages when dealing with acquisition of knowledge. In addition, the authors conclude that the analytical capabilities of the packages, i.e. their ability to transform information into intelligence, are almost non-existent. Such capabilities, they argue, require human intelligence, and this is an interesting comment if comparison is made to recent advances in artificial intelligence. The authors remark that these packages are far from being intelligent, and that such intelligence is needed in order to make CI a viable technology, which in their opinion currently is not.

This is an excellent software, I use it almost dayly as backing for my practice. I play jazz-guitar, and wether I want to practice improvising or comping this is a fantastic resource. I just type in the chords and choose an appropriate style. The program will produce excellent bass and druming, the piano, guitar and string is OK, while if you add a melody line that is goint to sound very MIDI-like, not like live music, but sometimes it is still useful to have the melody playing.

For soloing and melody playing the comp is very good. I do not buy book/CD with backing tracks anymore. Even when I want to practice comping, it is important to have at least the bass and rythm to get an idea of how the comping sounds with a full band. Also in this respect is this software excellent.

Beware though that this is a rich program, and a such it contains much more features than you are likely to ever apply. With this rich set of possibilities, the downside is that it may be difficult to figure out how to do what you want. On one occation I sent an e-mail to the support, and got a swift and very helpful response.

I have found multiple uses for this software as a musician, teacher, composer and arranger. In my classroom I only have one computer but I have managed to find many opportunities to integrate this product into classroom and private lesson instruction. The key to successful improvisation is listening. With Band-in-a-Box it is easy to plug in chord changes to any tune and play along with computer generated accompaniment. Many styles are available from Swing to Funk to various "Latin" styles. You or your students can play along and control tempo, key and style. If you have access to notation software such as Finale or Sibelius you can also generate rhythm or accompaniment parts with some editing which is handy for charts that do not have written out bass parts for younger players. This is an excellent resource for any student or professional jazz musician.

I just got this for Christmas and I have to say that the one problem with someone buying off an amazon wish list is it makes it nearly impossible to return the software. It does a decent job with drum and bass lines but don't even bother with the soloist features unless you like that midi sound that sounds more like a cell phone ringtone (not polyphonic even) than anything musical at all. I had this on my wishlist because it sounded like a great product and I do have more playing around to do with it but I am initially very disappointed.

Excellent, very well written, classic CBR book. It's a little outdated but the principles presented still hold in most cases.
While the content is very good, the quality of the hard cover is not; after 5 months of being barely used, it's already starting to fall apart, hence the 4 stars instead of 5.

CBR based system for phobia treatment.

This book was recommended to me by a professor to write a Case Based Reasoning tool. Although the book is extremely thorough and the author obviously experienced and well versed with the material, I could best describe the book as tedious. Unless you absolutely need to know every nitty gritty detail of case based reasoning (repeated at least 3 or 4 times over), I would recommend a more introductory book. Almost the entire book is devoted to theory, with one chapter containing some discussion on implementation. Even after reading all 600+ pages, I was still very uncertain on how to actually implement a CBR tool. However, it might be appropriate for a college-level artificial intelligence course focused on case based reasoning.

This is a must have book for anyone interested in coins in general and Celtic coins in particular. Amazon have provided an extremely interesting synopsis to this book that gives you all the basic informationyou will need to know on the contents of this book and it needs no addition from me.

With the influx of the metal detector, more and more old coins are coming on to the open market, you only need to look at e-bay to see that, but Celtic coins are not in abundance. There are probably far more Roman coins found than celtic.

What this book does very well is show the reader how much history can be learned from a single coin and the image that has been stamped upon it. Celtic coins for me seem to have that much more of an aura about them. in fact holding any old coin has a magic all of its own, not least, the thought of who was the last person to own and hold the coin before it was found once again.

Very informative little book, I learned a lot that I needed toknow but I wish that it could've had just a little more detail (butfor the price I can't complain). Now if a few Celtic coins would just show up on Amazon's auction site.

I am a beginner who was interested in British Celtic coin collection. This book is just the right length and the right depth for me. It has pictures of the main variations, some history of coin making, a little about the techniques, a regional breakdown of the various Celtic kingdoms and not too much more. I could read it in a couple of hours and feel informed enough to start looking for coins to buy. Highly recommended for beginners.