Professor George Luger

George Luger is a professor of computer science at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, New Mexico, located in the southwestern region of The United States. He holds a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, and a master's degree in each of pure and applied mathematics. He has been an active member of the artificial intelligence research community since the early 1970's.

Aside from his AI textbook, Professor Luger has published two other books: Cognitive Science: The Science of Intelligent Systems (1994), which explores the theoretical, philosophical, and computational issues of how the mind seems to work; and, Computation and Intelligence: Collected Readings (1995), which is a collection of essential papers that have shaped much of the development of AI.

AI Textbook

The general approach of Artificial Intelligence: Structures and Strategies for Complex Problem Solving is to be both complete and accessible. It is designed to be comprehensible to any graduate or motivated undergraduate computer science/engineering student. The text assumes only a basic foundation in discrete mathematics and simple algorithms, such as that typically attained at the sophomore or junior level. The fifth edition in particular includes in the main body short sections introducing the rudimentary material needed to understand the main topics. For example, there are sections that cover the basics of graph theory, counting, and probability. These sections are provided as introductions for beginners, or as refreshers for the rusty.

The topics discussed in the text are vast; they include the "Good Old Fashioned AI" topics that have persevered through years of research and application, as well as contemporary fields like stochastic methods, connectionist architectures, and agent-based models. As AI has inevitably (and thankfully!) evolved, as has this text. One of the books major strengths is the programming languages part, which teaches the reader how to realize many of the theoretical approaches introduced earlier in the book by way of functional and logic programming. See the preface for a detailed discussion on the material.

The first edition of Artificial Intelligence: Structures and Strategies for Complex Problem Solving came out in 1988; second edition, 1993; third edition, 1998; fourth edition, 2002; and the fifth edition in 2004.

George Luger's website is at www.cs.unm.edu/~luger, where you can find more biographical information and other publications.