Reviews for The Quest for Artificial Intelligence: A History of Ideas and Achievement

The average rating for The Quest for Artificial Intelligence: A History of Ideas and Achievement based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-02-06 00:00:00 Mike Thompson Love love love this book! I got an interest in AI from reading Kevin Warwick's excellent book "Artifical Intelligence- The Basics" and this book highlights the history of the movement and builds from there. If you dig programming, cognitive science and philosophy then this book could be the book for you. It's so easy to read! There's also some humorous anecdotes. For example, the US in the 80's was terrified of a much publicized Japanese push into AI and invested heavily in AI systems for its army, navy and airforce. The army project was a self driving truck which worked ok to detect the road, provided it was summer and there was a stable terrain. However in autumn when the sun was lower and there were leaves on the road, the truck's cameras often meant it went off-road by accident. Not great for the combat field. The navy project was for the most efficient deployment of ships in the Pacific fleet and cut decision making from minutes to hours. The US admirals stated while this was an improvement, in practice it took days for the ships to travel and in case, they were not about to take early retirement anytime soon! So AI has met with many set-backs, but many of the processes that have been developed to overcome them, such as Bayesian networks, are outlined here in a relatively straightforward manner for a university grad to understand. There's info on the funding politics behind AI and why AI is so different to human intelligence i.e. Deep Blue beating Kasparov at chess by brute force rather than "intelligence". And even if you are not involved in the AI field yourself, it's often by thinking about AI problems that we learn more about how our own brains work.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-06-24 00:00:00 Chong Shipei A sweet informal history of AI research from a Stanford doyen. In places it is actually oral history - ...Jack was the Director of DARPA from 1987 to 1989 and presided over some cutbacks in AI research (including the cancellation of one of my own research projects) Like any history, the history of computing is full of little myths - e.g. that Lovelace was the first programmer, that von Neumann originated stored-program memory, that ENIAC was the first true computer, that hardware and software is a clean and natural division in kind... Nilsson calmly lets out the air of these and more. [Free here]