Intelligent agents are employed as the central characters in this introductory text. Beginning with elementary reactive agents, Nilsson gradually increases their cognitive horsepower to illustrate the most important and lasting ideas in AI. Neural networks, genetic programming, computer vision, heuristic search, knowledge representation and reasoning, Bayes networks, planning, and language understanding are each revealed through the growing capabilities of these agents. A distinguishing feature of this text is in its evolutionary approach to the study of AI. This book provides a refreshing and motivating synthesis of the field by one of AI's master expositors and leading researches. - An evolutionary approach provides a unifying theme - Thorough coverage of important AI ideas, old and new - Frequent use of examples and illustrative diagrams - Extensive coverage of machine learning methods throughout the text - Citations to over 500 references - Comprehensive index