Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).

Dreams and dreamers -- Clues -- Gatherings -- Pattern recognition -- Early heuristic programs -- Semantic representations -- Natural language processing -- 1960s' infrastructure -- Computer vision -- "Hand-eye" research -- Knowledge representation and reasoning -- Mobile robots -- Progress in natural language processing -- Game playing -- The Dendral Project -- Conferences, books, and funding -- Speech recognition and understanding systems -- Consulting systems -- Understanding queries and signals -- Progress in computer vision -- Boomtimes -- The Japanese create a stir -- DARPA's strategic computing program -- Speed bumps -- Controversies and alternative paradigms -- Reasoning and representation -- Other approaches to reasoning and representation -- Bayesian networks -- Machine learning -- Natural languages and natural scenes -- Intelligent system architectures -- Extraordinary achievements -- Ubiquitous artificial intelligence -- Smart tools -- The quest continues.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a field within computer science that is attempting to build enhanced intelligence into computer systems. This book traces the history of the subject, from the early dreams of eighteenth-century (and earlier) pioneers to the more successful work of today's AI engineers. AI is becoming more and more a part of everyone's life. The technology is already embedded in face-recognizing cameras, speech-recognition software, Internet search engines, and health-care robots, among other applications. The book's many diagrams and easy-to-understand descriptions of AI programs will help the casual reader gain an understanding of how these and other AI systems actually work. Its thorough (but unobtrusive) end-of-chapter notes containing citations to important source materials will be of great use to AI scholars and researchers. This book promises to be the definitive history of a field that has captivated the imaginations of scientists, philosophers, and writers for centuries.