Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!think.com!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!wuarchive!uunet!mcsun!ukc!servax0!csc2!scotp From: scotp@csc2.essex.ac.uk (Scott P D) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: Writing an AI Program Message-ID: <5303@servax0.essex.ac.uk> Date: 12 Jun 91 14:57:32 GMT References: Sender: news@servax0.essex.ac.uk Reply-To: scotp@essex.ac.uk (Scott P D) Organization: University of Essex, Colchester, UK Lines: 36 In article elon@phsbbs.princeton.nj.us (Elon Danziger) writes: > > I was recently referred to three books about AI, namely GODEL ESCHER >BACH, AI AND NATURAL MAN, and MACHINES WHO THINK (I have the first two and >can get the last). What I would like to do is to try to write some type of >AI program--probably in Pascal. I have quite a bit of experience with >Pascal, but not that much with AI. My question is, can anyone point out >anything particularly interesting that I could program (given the limitation >that I have a Mac IICX, and limited space and memory)? Don't be put off be those who tell you that you have to use Lisp or Prolog to do real AI. While there are good reasons why those languages are widely used, you can do a lot of interesting work using Pascal. If you stick to problems that don't need fancy knowledge representation schemes you can do a great deal with a straightforward procedural language. In fact quite a lot of machine learning research work is done using Pascal or C. The "Manhattan Cab Driver" would make a good start. The system is given a town plan, which consists of a rectangular grid of roads. To make the problem interesting some of the roads are closed and some are one-way streets. Then the system is given a start point and a destination. Its task is to find a good (eg shortest) route from one to the other. This problem will allow you to try out a variety of search techniques. Provided you are familiar with building and manipulating lists using pointers, you should have no problem doing this in Pascal. You could also arrange for the town plan to be displayed and thus illustrate how the searches proceed. I don't think you will find any of the three books you mention to be particularly helpful in writing AI programs. I would suggest you try to get hold of a decent introductory textbook on the subject: Rich & Knight's "Artificial Intelligence" (McGraw-Hill, 1991) is pretty good and isn't built around either Lisp or Prolog. It would also provide you with further ideas for programming projects. Paul Scott, Dept Computer Science, University of Essex, Colchester, UK.