This book was written for both professional programmers and home hobbyists who already know how to program in Java and who want to learn practical AI programming techniques. I have tried to make this a fun book to work through. In the style of a cook book, the chapters in this book can be studied in any order. Each chapter follows the same pattern: a motivation for learning a technique, some theory for the technique, and a Java example program that you can experiment with.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Kevin Knight for writing a flexible framework for game search algorithms in Common LISP (Rich, Knight 1991) and for giving me permission to reuse his framework, rewritten in Java; the game search Java classes in Chapter 1 were loosely patterned after this Common LISP framework and allows new games to be written by sub classing three abstract Java classes. I would like to thank Sieuwert van Otterloo for writing the Prolog in Java program and for giving me permission to use it in this free web book. I would like to thank Ernest J. Friedman-Hill at Sandia National Laboratory for writing the Jess expert system toolkit. I would like to thank Christopher Manning and Hinrich Schutze for writing their Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing book; it is one of the most useful textbooks that I own. I would like to thank my wife Carol for her support in both writing this book, and all of my other projects. I would also like to acknowledge the use of the following fine software tools: IntelliJ Java IDE and the Poseidon UML modeling tool (www.gentleware.com).