I. Reactive Machines. Stimulus-Response Agents. Neural Networks. Machine Evolution. State Machines. Robot Vision -- II. Search in State Spaces. Agents That Plan. Uninformed Search. Heuristic Search. Planning, Acting, and Learning. Alternative Search Formulations and Applications. Adversarial Search -- III. Knowledge Representation and Reasoning. The Propositional Calculus. Resolution in the Propositional Calculus. The Predicate Calculus. Resolution in the Predicate Calculus. Knowledge-Based Systems. Representing Commonsense Knowledge. Reasoning with Uncertain Information. Learning and Acting with Bayes Nets -- IV. Planning Methods Based on Logic. The Situation Calculus. Planning -- V. Communication and Integration. Multiple Agents.

Intelligent agents are employed as the central characters in this introductory text. Beginning with elementary reactive agents, Nilsson gradually increases their cognitive horsepower to illustrate the most important and lasting ideas in AI. Neural networks, genetic programming, computer vision, heuristic search, knowledge representation and reasoning, Bayes networks, planning, and language understanding are each revealed through the growing capabilities of these agents. A distinguishing feature of this text is in its evolutionary approach to the study of AI. This book provides a refreshing and motivating synthesis of the field by one of AI's master expositors and leading researches.