"In this authoritative and accessible one-stop introduction to artificial intelligence, a full first course in AI is presented, making it ideal for a modular undergraduate degree scheme or Masters conversion course." "The book has been designed to provide an understanding of the foundations of artificial intelligence. It examines the central computational techniques embraced by AI - knowledge representation, search, reasoning and learning - and the principal application domains - experts systems, natural language, vision, robotics, software agents and cognitive modelling. In a concluding section some of the major philosophical and ethical issues of AI are also introduced."--BOOK JACKET.