Algorithm Demonstrations

These demos are provided to help the student visualize the "under-the-hood" processes of algorithms given in the text.

Graph Search

Graph search is discussed in detail in Chapters 3 and 4 in the 5th edition. It is an abstract way to formulate the solution to a variety problems, and is a fundamental theme in AI. This applet allows the user to specify a goal node and a search strategy, while highlighting the vertices at each step, and showing the open/closed lists.

Edit Distance

The edit distance algorithm is discussed in section 4.1 of the 5th edition, and is a canonical example of dynamic programming. The purpose is to determine the number of edit operations to convert one text string into another, providing a sort of "distance" metric between the two strings. It is used in many natural language processing and computational biology tasks.

ALICE Chat Bot

Natural language understanding (chapter 14, 5th ed.) has long been a core area of interest to AI researchers. This demo is a chat bot that responds to user input in a seeminly intelligent way. It is based on the ALICE system. The ALICE system uses AIML, a markup language for specifying the behavior of an interactive chat bot. For more information on AIML and ALICE, visit http://www.alicebot.org . Admittedly, this is as much for fun as for demonstration!

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Inside The Book

Table of Contents

Preface

Chapter One