[comp.ai.philosophy] Looking for good "beginner's" AI book.

ddt@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu (David Taylor) (06/29/91)

I spend a lot of time writing "robots" (computer players) for games and
organizing computer programming contests.  The robots are not terribly easy to
write and usually involve a lot of stack-based state machines.  On top of that,
they have trouble playing on the weaknesses of other players.  A friend of
mine recently described something to me known as "adaptive algorithms".
Didn't quite get the whole gist of the conversation, but it sounded really
neat and worth looking into.

Can anyone suggest a book oriented towards programmers, or perhaps just a
really good algorithm book, which describes some of the basics of these
techniques?  I'm totally new to AI ... thanx for any help y'all can provide.
By the way, the faster the better.  Doesn't have to be /really/ smart if
it can run and learn quickly.

Another question- are most AI applications easily vectorizable if they are
of a numerical nature?  Parallelizable?  Full o' questions...

	=-ddt->