Alan K. Mackworth President of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence

In AI's youth, we worked hard to establish our paradigm by vigorously attacking and excluding apparent pretenders to the throne of intelligence, pretenders such as pattern recognition, behaviorism, neural networks, and even probability theory. Now that we are established, such ideological purity is no longer a concern. We are more catholic, focusing on problems, not on hammers. Given that we do have a comprehensive toolbox, issues of architecture and integration emerge as central. - Alan K. Mackworth, "The Coevolution of AI and AAAI," AI Magazine 26(4): Winter 2005, 51-52

AI TOPICS is a special web site provided by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence [AAAI] for students, teachers, journalists, and everyone who would like to explore what artificial intelligence is, and what AI scientists do.

Our goal is to offer a limited number of exemplary, non-technical resources that we have organized and annotated to provide you with meaningful access to basic, understandable information about the AI universe. Each of the AI TOPICS (see below) and SUBTOPICS (see Site Map) will lead you to a variety of online sources of information, and the occasional print resource. To understand what you can (and cannot) expect from this site and to maximize its usefulness, we ask that you please read our Springboard page.

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And now to get you started, here are ...

The Topics

... and some especially helpful pages