Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach

• 1. Introduction

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  Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach has been called "the most popular artificial intelligence textbook in the world." Written by Stuart J. Russell and Peter Norvig, the book carries more than 59,000 citations on Google Scholar. As of 2023, it was in use at over 1500 universities worldwide and is considered the standard text in the field of artificial intelligence. What fills its pages that so many campuses rely on? How do its algorithms move from print into working code? And how has a single title stayed current across several editions and translations?

• 2. Inside The Book

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  Searching algorithms sit alongside first-order logic, propositional logic, and probabilistic reasoning at the core of the book's classical chapters. From there the chapters push into multi-agent systems, constraint satisfaction problems, optimization problems, artificial neural networks, deep learning, reinforcement learning, and computer vision. Publishers aim the book at an undergraduate audience, though it also supports graduate-level study, provided instructors add primary sources drawn from its extensive bibliography. That range, stretching from foundational search to modern computer vision, extends into the code the authors publish alongside the text.

• 3. From Page To Code

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  Every algorithm in the book appears first as pseudo code on the page. Working versions of those same algorithms exist in Java, Python, Lisp, JavaScript, and Scala, all available online. The authors also maintain a GitHub repository, where implementations of the book's exercises and algorithms live across those languages. That repository has kept pace with a book that has now passed through several editions across multiple decades of change in the field.

• 4. Four Editions

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  The first edition reached readers in 1995, wrapped in a red cover. A green cover followed for the second edition in 2003, then blue for the third in 2009. The fourth edition, bound in purple, arrived on the 28th of April 2020. Publishers have carried various editions into languages beyond the original English, among them Chinese, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Romanian, Russian, and Serbian. Beyond the US print run described here, publication dates and cover colors shift for editions released in other countries.