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Comment by jey | Hacker News Reader

Here's the standard AI textbook: http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/

I'm assuming you mean "AI" in the sense of "fancy mathematical tricks to solve domain specific problems", not in the sense of artificial general intelligence.

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Jey I agree, I highly recommend Norvig and Russell's book. I had a one semester course back in college that used this. I actually just recently have been programming some of the exercises up in Ruby just to stay sharp with some different kind of coding than the standard webapp stuff. It has some great problems, and has source code available in many languages (not ruby unfortunately, but I guess makes it more of a challenge).

Norvig also has some great essays and example AI code on his site, http://norvig.com/

I agree it's a great book but IMO it's important to understand that modern AI is about:

1. Classification and Learning (aka is that apple ripe? or what's the best website for a given search?)

2. Modeling / Machine vision (Where are the rocks around this rover.)

3. Goal Seeking (AKA what's the best path from here to DC.)

With enough resources we can do any of the above fairly well. So using AI is more about understanding how to link the above activities to some useful problem. AKA control a rover when your ping is 15 min or solve a CAPTCHA.

I actually don't find this sort of research all that interesting.

I like out of the box solutions more:

http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143

Second that thanks. That was expletively amazing. I didn't expect to watch more than the intro but couldn't stop. That's an intersection of CS and HCI cleverness raised to the level of art.

That's brilliant, amichail. Thanks.

Fantastic video, thank you!

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