Problem Solving Methods in Artificial Intelligence

As regards theoretical knowledge, some have sought a unified theory of artificial intelligence. My view is that artificial intelligence is (or soon will be) an engineering discipline since its primary goal is to build things. Thus it makes no more sense to look for a theory of artificial intelligence than it does to look for a theory of civil engineering. Instead of a central theory, there are many theoretical subjects that are relevant and should be studied by students specializing in artificial intelligence. Some of these include mathematical logic, computational linguistics, theory of computation, information structure, control theory, statistical classification theory, graph theory, graph theory, and theory of heuristic search. The last named subject, heuristic search, is the main hope of this book. Solving problems by heuristically guide, trial-and-error search in a space of possible solutions is a dominant theme in artificial-intelligence research, yet there is no single textbook devoted to explaining the underlying theoretical ideas of these search processes. This book has been written in an attempt to fill that need. It covers throughly the major heuristic search methods used to automatic problem solving, theorem proving, and game playing