This is an introduction to the theory and practice of artificial intelligence. It uses an intelligent agent as the unifying theme throughout, and covers areas that are sometimes underemphasized elsewhere. These include reasoning under uncertainty, learning, natural language, vision and robotics. The book also explains in detail some of the more recent ideas in the field, including simulated annealing, memory-bounded search, global ontologies, dynamic belief networks, neural nets, inductive logic programming, computational learning theory, and reinforcement learning.