Good introduction to artificial intelligence?

Question

I have been told that as part of my degree year I will be learning about Artificial Intelligence. My lecturers have recommended a couple of books:

Artificial Intelligence: A Systems Approach (Computer Science)
Artificial Intelligence (A Modern Approach)

I've watched a couple of lectures hosted by Jeff Hawkins, they were good although a little advanced for me. Could someone recommend any other books or lectures that introduce the topic?

Answer 1

This is the book (Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach) I used in College ... http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/

I remember it being a good book and it's recommended by a lot of people.

For Machine Learning - i would recommend the following book: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom/mlbook.html (Machine Learning by Tom Mitchell).

again, it's the book i used in college and it gives a good overview of ML concepts.

Answer 2

MIT OpenCourseware is often very good (and free):

6.034 Artificial Intelligence:

This course introduces representations, techniques, and architectures used to build applied systems and to account for intelligence from a computational point of view. This course also explores applications of rule chaining, heuristic search, logic, constraint propagation, constrained search, and other problem-solving paradigms. In addition, it covers applications of decision trees, neural nets, SVMs and other learning paradigms.

Answer 3

The above-mentioned are good, just to throw a few other ones that I think are good into the mix:

For genetic, rule-based, and some simple neural-net material: Artificial Intelligence: A Guide to Intelligent Systems by Michael Negnevitsky (used in my AI class).

For ML concepts including in-depth neural-net, classification, supervised, unsupervised, and semi-supervised learning, as well as broad range of statistics/math: Machine Learning: An Algorithmic Perspective by Stephen Marsland (used in my ML class)