Slovak University of Technology, Bratislava, 2001

The book attempts to provide comprehensive fundamentals of artificial intelligence. It covers most, if not all the major basic topics of the field. Moreover, it treats several themes in a considerably more depth. It is intended primarily as a textbook for the subject Artificial Intelligence but it can be used also as a source for other related subjects, such as Knowledge Based Systems or Artificial Neural Networks, and for other topics, such as Distributed Artificial Intelligence or Vision.

The book has an introduction, three main parts and appendices. The introduction discusses the very notion of artificial intelligence. The concept of rational agent is introduced, which is one of the dominant features of the whole book. Notes on history of the field in general and also in particular on contribution of the authors’ Department conclude the introduction.

In the first part, fundamentals of artificial intelligence are covered in both width and depth that is not only sufficient for any first course, but contains a wealth of additional material for further study. This is especially true for chapters on artificial neural networks and vision. Other chapters are problem solving, logical reasoning, planning and machine learning.

The second part is devoted to the area of knowledge engineering. The area is first introduced. Knowledge acquisition, knowledge representation and architecture, and development of knowledge based systems are the main topics.

The third part tackles the very promising area of distributed artificial intelligence. Multiagent systems are introduced and their classification is discussed. Their communication, cooperation and coordination is studied.

One unique feature of the book are the appendices that include three project reports on different topics written by students of the authors. Needless to say, all the authors have both teaching and research records in the field.

The first report is on intelligent information retrieval written by a PhD student. The second is on natural language processing applied to Slovak language written by a Masters student. The third is on design of a platform for development of multiagent systems that play robot soccer written by a team of undergraduate students. All the three topics are very interesting areas of current research.

All the chapters are equipped with examples and exercises.