Re: AI books

[Subbarao Kambhampati <rao@asu.edu>]

There are too many books about AI written for the educated
lay public. T
I havent read many of them .  To the extent I read these, I tend to
pick the 
"How Humans Do it.." sort of books, since that is not what I do
during the day.. 
Some of the good ones I have are

--Pretty much any book by Steven Pinker (esepcially his Language
Instinct, and much less so, his How the Mind Works). 
These are not as much about AI as about the "How humans do it"
part of AI

--Anthony De Massio's Descartes Error is  an interesting explanation
of role of "emotion" in rational behavior (written from the
point of view of how our brain works).

--There are several books--"Polemics"-- written either in favor
of or against the whole enterprise of making rational machines. Among the
anti- position books
are the one by Roger Penrose's Emperors New Mind, which argues that it is
impossible to achieve human level cognition using computers. 
(I should say that I never got past the first couple of pages of that
book)

That is it for now.

Rao


At 05:06 PM 8/28/2003 -0700, Thomas Hernandez wrote:

> Dr Rao:
>
> I'm looking for a few nice AI books that are popularizations of the
> field.
> You mentioned Herbert Simon's one in class which I had already read
> about.
> When you have a minute could you suggest a couple more to me that come
> to
> your mind and that you particularly liked?
>
> Thanks,
> Thomas