Artificial Intelligence FAQ:1/6 General Questions & Answers [Monthly posting]

Archive-name: ai-faq/general/part1
Posting-Frequency: monthly
Last-Modified: 1-Apr-04 rc by Ric Crabbe
Version: 2.1
Maintainer: Ric Crabbe <crabbe@usna.edu> and Amit Dubey <adubey@coli.uni-sb.de>
URL: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/ai-faq/general
Size: 46550 bytes, 1051 lines

;;; ****************************************************************
;;; Answers to Questions about Artificial Intelligence *************
;;; ****************************************************************
;;; Maintained by: Amit Dubey <adubey@coli.uni-sb.de>
;;;		   Ric Crabbe <crabbe@usna.edu>
;;;                           <http://www.cs.usna.edu/~crabbe>
;;; Written by Ric Crabbe, Amit Dubey, and Mark Kantrowitz
;;; ai_1.faq 

If you think of questions that are appropriate for this FAQ, or would
like to improve an answer, please send email to the maintianers.

*** Copyright:

Some portions of this FAQ are Copyright (c) 1992-94 by Mark
Kantrowitz.  The rest are Copyright (c) 1999,2000-04 by Ric Crabbe and Amit
Dubey 

*** Disclaimer:

       This article is provided as is without any express or implied
       warranties.  While every effort has been taken to ensure the
       accuracy of the information contained in this article, the
       author/maintainer/contributors assume(s) no responsibility for
       errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from the use of
       the information contained herein. 

*** What's new?
;;; 01-Apr-04 rc	Replaced "game of life" question with
			information theory.  Other assorted fixes.
;;; 29-Jun-03 rc	Have begun a section on comercial AI software.
			Added question on "tell me all about AI"
;;; 29-May-03 rc	Added question on A*

*** Topics Covered:

Part 1:

  [1-0]  What is the purpose of this newsgroup?
  [1-1]  I have a Question not covered in the FAQ...
  [1-2]	 What is AI?
  [1-3]	 What's the difference between strong AI and weak AI?
  [1-4]  I have little/no background in CompSci/AI, can you tell
	 me in detail how AI works?
  [1-5]	 I'm a programmer interested in AI.  Where do I start?
  [1-6]  What's an agent?
  [1-7]  History of AI.
  [1-8]	 What has AI accomplished?
  [1-9]	 What are the branches of AI?
  [1-10]	 What are good programming languages for AI?
  [1-11]  What's the difference between "classical" AI and "statistical" AI?
  [1-12]  I have the idea for an AI Project that will solve all of AI...
  [1-13]  Glossary of AI terms.
  [1-14]  In A*, why does the heuristic have to always underestimate?
  [1-15]  I'm considering studying AI. What information is there for me? 
  [1-16]  What are good graduate schools for AI?
  [1-17]  No really, just give me a ranking of the best
	  graduate schools for AI!
  [1-18]  What are the ratings of the various AI journals?
  [1-19]  Where can I find conference information?
  [1-20]  How can I get the email address for Joe or Jill Researcher?
  [1-21]  What does it mean to say a game is 'solved'?  Is tic-tac-toe
	  solved? How about X?
  [1-22]  What's this Information Theory thing?
  [1-23]  What AI competitions exist?
  [1-24]  Open source software and AI.
  [1-25]  AI Job Postings
  [1-26]  Future Directions of AI
  [1-27]  Where are the FAQs for...neural nets? natural language?
	  artificial life? fuzzy logic? genetic algorithms?
	  philosophy? Lisp? Prolog? robotics?

Part 2 (AI-related News, Newsgroups and Mailing Lists):

  -  List of all known AI-related newsgroups, newsgroup archives, mailing
     lists, and electronic bulletin board systems.

     http://www.faqs.org/faqs/ai-faq/general/part2/preamble.html

Part 3 (AI-related Associations and Journals):

  -  List of AI-related associations and journals, organized by subfield.

     http://www.faqs.org/faqs/ai-faq/general/part3/preamble.html

Part 4 (Bibliography):

  -  Bibliography of introductory texts, overviews and references
  -  Addresses and phone numbers for major AI publishers
  -  Finding conference proceedings
  -  Finding PhD dissertations

     http://www.faqs.org/faqs/ai-faq/general/part4/preamble.html

Part 5 (FTP and WWW Resources and Repositories):

  -  Information on Web resources and software repositories for AI.
  -  Information on Technical Papers in AI
  -  Web journals
  -  Part 5 concentrates mostly on documents and collections of links
     to other AI resources

     http://www.faqs.org/faqs/ai-faq/general/part5/preamble.html

Part 6 (AI Open-Source Software by Sub-field)
  - An A-Z (well A-T anyway) of Open source (or at least free)
    software with relation to AI.
  - A nascent list of commercial AI software,

    http://www.faqs.org/faqs/ai-faq/general/part6/preamble.html
  

Search for [#] to get to question number # quickly.

*** Introduction:

Certain questions and topics come up frequently in the various network
discussion groups devoted to and related to Artificial Intelligence
(AI).  This file/article is an attempt to gather these questions and
their answers into a convenient reference for AI researchers. It is
posted on a monthly basis. The hope is that this will cut down on the
user time and network bandwidth used to post, read and respond to the
same questions over and over, as well as providing education by
answering questions some readers may not even have thought to ask.

The latest version of this FAQ is NO-LONGER available via anonymous
FTP from:
   ftp://ftp.cs.ucla.edu/pub/AI/
as the files ai_[1-7].faq.

The cannonical source is now:
   http://www.faqs.org/faqs/ai-faq/general

The FAQ postings are also archived in the periodic posting archive on

   rtfm.mit.edu:/pub/usenet/news.answers/ai-faq/general/ [18.181.0.24]

If you do not have anonymous ftp access, you can access the archive by
mail server as well.  Send an E-mail message to mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu
with "help" and "index" in the body on separate lines for more
information.
Section Contents
Part1 - Part2 - Part3 - Part4 - Part5 - Part6 - Single Page
[ Usenet FAQs | Search | Web FAQs | Documents | RFC Index ]
Send corrections/additions to the FAQ Maintainer:
crabbe@usna.edu, adubey@coli.uni-sb.de
Last Update December 03 2008 @ 00:09 AM