Students explore the idea that thinking is a form of computation by learning to write simple computer programs for tasks that require thought.This book guides students through an exploration of the idea that thinking might be understood as a form of computation. Students make the connection between thinking and computing by learning to write computer programs for a variety of tasks that require thought, including solving puzzles, understanding natural language, rec...

What can artificial intelligence tell us about the mind and intelligent behavior? A computer science expert explores the importance of common sense in everyday decision making.What can artificial intelligence teach us about the mind? If AI’s underlying concept is that thinking is a computational process, then how can computation illuminate thinking? It’s a timely question. Artificial intelligence is all the rage, and the buzziest AI buzz surrounds adap...

How we can create artificial intelligence with broad, robust common sense rather than narrow, specialized expertise.It’s sometime in the not-so-distant future, and you send your fully autonomous self-driving car to the store to pick up your grocery order. The car is endowed with as much capability as an artificial intelligence agent can have, programmed to drive better than you do. But when the car encounters a traffic light stuck on red, it just sits there—indefin...

Knowledge representation is at the very core of a radical idea for understanding intelligence. Instead of trying to understand or build brains from the bottom up, its goal is to understand and build intelligent behavior from the top down, putting the focus on what an agent needs to know in order to behave intelligently, how this knowledge can be represented symbolically, and how automated reasoning procedures can make this knowledge available as needed. This landmark text takes the central...