About the Book:

Chapter 1 begins with early speculations about  Artificial Intelligence by the Greek Philosopher Aristotle in 1st Century and the Italian Inventor Leonardi Da Vinci in the 15^th Century.

Chapter 2 introduces the concepts of symbolic logic from a historical perspective by reviewing contributions from the mathematician Leibniz in the 18^th century as well as artificial neural network architectures implementing the Boolean logic of George Boole (1854)  which were described in 1943 by the computational neuroscientist Warren McCulloch and brilliant young mathematician Walter Pitts. Chapter 3 provides a fascinating review of three early and influential meetings which signaled the official birth of the field of Artificial Intelligence. These conferences were the Session on Learning Machines held at the 1955 Western Joint Computer Conference in Los Angeles. The Summer Research Project in Artificial Intelligence at Dartmouth College in 1956. And, in 1958,  a meeting titled the “Mechanization of Thought Processes” located in the United Kingdom.  The book continues with an evolutionary on the development of artificial intelligence with some discussion of machine learning and probabilistic methods but primarily emphasizing symbolic logic perspectives. The book ends with a review of the DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) Grand Challenge which was held on July 30, 2002. The DARPA challenge invited researchers from the United States to design and build a driverless car capable of completing a 142 mile course from Barstow, California  to Primm, Nevada for a cash prize of $1,000,000. Sixteen vehicles competed in the challenge and they all failed or crashed within the first ten miles of the journey.

Finally, one really fun feature of this book is that it includes photographs of B.F. Skinner, Noam Chomsky, Grey Walter, Ross Ashby, Warren McCulloch, Norman Wiener, Alan Turing, Claude Shannon, Herb Simon, Allen Newell, Oliver Selfridge, John McCarty, Frank Rosenblatt, Peter Hart, Richard Duda, Judea Pearl, David Rumelhart, James McClelland, Andy Barto, Richard Sutton, Marvin Minsky and others when they were young adults!

Target Audience:
The Quest for Artificial Intelligence will be of interest not only for AI newbies but also engineers, scientists, and researchers who will benefit from a high-level overview of the evolutionary origins of current work in AI from the 1^st to 20^th century. The book sketches the major events which shaped the field of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning as we know them today. In addition, the book does not assume a strong technical background so it should be easily understood not only by scientists in the field but also the general public.

About the Author:
Professor Nils J. Nilsson, Professor of Engineering Emeritus in the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University received his doctorate in electrical engineering from Stanford in 1958 when the field of Artificial Intelligence was in its infancy. Professor Nilsson is a past president and Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and is recognized as a leader in the field.