This book is a collection of writings by active researchers in the field of Artificial General Intelligence, on topics of central importance in the field. Each chapter focuses on one theoretical problem, proposes a novel solution, and is written in sufficiently non-technical language to be understandable by advanced undergraduates or scientists in allied fields. This book is the very first collection in the field of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) focusing on theoretical, conceptual, and philosophical issues in the creation of thinking machines. All the authors are researchers actively developing AGI projects, thus distinguishing the book from much of the theoretical cognitive science and AI literature, which is generally quite divorced from practical AGI system building issues. And the discussions are presented in a way that makes the problems and proposed solutions understandable to a wide readership of non-specialists, providing a distinction from the journal and conference-proceedings literature. The book will benefit AGI researchers and students by giving them a solid orientation in the conceptual foundations of the field (which is not currently available anywhere); and it would benefit researchers in allied fields by giving them a high-level view of the current state of thinking in the AGI field. Furthermore, by addressing key topics in the field in a coherent way, the collection as a whole may play an important role in guiding future research in both theoretical and practical AGI, and in linking AGI research with work in allied disciplines

This outstanding collection is designed to address the fundamental issues and principles underlying the task of Artificial Intelligence.

In the 11 contributions, theorists historically associated with each position identify the basic tenets of their position.Have the classical methods and ideas of AI outlived their usefulness? Foundations of Artificial Intelligence critically evaluates the fundamental assumptions underpinning the dominant approaches to AI. In the 11 contributions, theorists historically associated with each position identify the basic tenets of their position. They discuss the underlying principles, describe the natural types of problems and tasks in which their approach succeeds, explain where its power comes from, and what its scope and limits are. Theorists generally skeptical of these positions evaluate the effectiveness of the method or approach and explain why it works - to the extent they believe it does - and why it eventually fails.ContentsFoundations of AI: The Big Issues, D. Kirsh - Logic and Artificial Intelligence, N. J. Nilsson - Rigor Mortis: A Response to Nilsson's 'Logic and Artificial Intelligence, ' L. Birnbaum - Open Information Systems Semantics for Distributed Artificial Intelligence, C. Hewitt - Social Conceptions of Knowledge and Action: DAI Foundations and Open Systems Semantics, L. Gasser - Intelligence without Representation, R. A. Brooks - Today the Earwig, Tomorrow Man? D. Kirsh - On the Thresholds of Knowledge, D. B. Lenat, E. A. Feigenbaum - The Owl and the Electric Encyclopedia, B. C. Smith - A Preliminary Analysis of the Soar Architecture as a Basis for General Intelligence, P. S. Rosenbloom, J. E. Laird, A. Newell, R. McCarl - Approaches to the Study of Intelligence, D. A. Norman

Fundamentals of Artificial Intelligence introduces the foundations of present day AI and provides coverage to recent developments in AI such as Constraint Satisfaction Problems, Adversarial Search and Game Theory, Statistical Learning Theory, Automated Planning, Intelligent Agents, Information Retrieval, Natural Language & Speech Processing, and Machine Vision. The book features a wealth of examples and illustrations, and practical approaches along with the theoretical concepts. It covers all major areas of AI in the domain of recent developments. The book is intended primarily for students who major in computer science at undergraduate and graduate level but will also be of interest as a foundation to researchers in the area of AI.

Intended both as a text for advanced undergraduates and graduate students, and as a key reference work for AI researchers and developers, Logical Foundations of Artificial Intelligence is a lucid, rigorous, and comprehensive account of the fundamentals of artificial intelligence from the standpoint of logic. The first section of the book introduces the logicist approach to AI--discussing the representation of declarative knowledge and featuring an introduction to the process of conceptualization, the syntax and semantics of predicate calculus, and the basics of other declarative representations such as frames and semantic nets. This section also provides a simple but powerful inference procedure, resolution, and shows how it can be used in a reasoning system. The next several chapters discuss nonmonotonic reasoning, induction, and reasoning under uncertainty, broadening the logical approach to deal with the inadequacies of strict logical deduction. The third section introduces modal operators that facilitate representing and reasoning about knowledge. This section also develops the process of writing predicate calculus sentences to the metalevel--to permit sentences about sentences and about reasoning processes. The final three chapters discuss the representation of knowledge about states and actions, planning, and intelligent system architecture. End-of-chapter bibliographic and historical comments provide background and point to other works of interest and research. Each chapter also contains numerous student exercises (with solutions provided in an appendix) to reinforce concepts and challenge the learner. A bibliography and index complete this comprehensive work.

“Only a small community has concentratedon general intelligence. No one has tried to make a thinking machine . . . The bottom line is that we really haven’t progressed too far toward a truly intelligent machine. We have collections of dumb specialists in small domains; the true majesty of general intelligence still awaits our attack. . . . We have got to get back to the deepest questions of AI and general intelligence. . . ” –MarvinMinsky as interviewed in Hal’s Legacy, edited by David Stork, 2000. Our goal in creating this edited volume has been to ?ll an apparent gap in the scienti?c literature, by providing a coherent presentation of a body of contemporary research that, in spite of its integral importance, has hitherto kept a very low pro?le within the scienti?c and intellectual community. This body of work has not been given a name before; in this book we christen it “Arti?cial General Intelligence” (AGI). What distinguishes AGI work from run-of-the-mill “arti?cial intelligence” research is that it is explicitly focused on engineering general intelligence in the short term. We have been active researchers in the AGI ?eld for many years, and it has been a pleasure to gather together papers from our colleagues working on related ideas from their own perspectives. In the Introduction we give a conceptual overview of the AGI ?eld, and also summarize and interrelate the key ideas of the papers in the subsequent chapters.

Personal motivation. The dream of creating artificial devices that reach or outperform human inteUigence is an old one. It is also one of the dreams of my youth, which have never left me. What makes this challenge so interesting? A solution would have enormous implications on our society, and there are reasons to believe that the AI problem can be solved in my expected lifetime. So, it's worth sticking to it for a lifetime, even if it takes 30 years or so to reap the benefits. The AI problem. The science of artificial intelligence (AI) may be defined as the construction of intelligent systems and their analysis. A natural definition of a system is anything that has an input and an output stream. Intelligence is more complicated. It can have many faces like creativity, solving prob lems, pattern recognition, classification, learning, induction, deduction, build ing analogies, optimization, surviving in an environment, language processing, and knowledge. A formal definition incorporating every aspect of intelligence, however, seems difficult. Most, if not all known facets of intelligence can be formulated as goal driven or, more precisely, as maximizing some utility func tion. It is, therefore, sufficient to study goal-driven AI; e. g. the (biological) goal of animals and humans is to survive and spread. The goal of AI systems should be to be useful to humans.