Artificial Intelligence

Search, planning, knowledge representation, and reasoning.


foundation tier

Artificial Intelligence addresses search, planning, knowledge representation, and reasoning. It sits within AI and Machine Learning and inherits that area’s core questions about correctness, scale, and tractability. This page surveys the conceptual axes of the topic and points to the references that frame ongoing research and teaching. The intent is to be useful both as an entry point for newcomers and as an index for practitioners cross-checking their mental model against the field’s primary sources.

Work on artificial intelligence can be organised around a few interlocking concerns: the formal objects under study, the algorithms or systems that compute over them, the resource trade-offs (time, memory, communication, statistical efficiency), and the empirical or theoretical guarantees that practitioners rely on. The sources cited below approach the topic from a mix of these angles.

Foundational references

Russell, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (2020) is a standard reference for this material and is used both as a curriculum anchor and as a long-form survey of techniques.

Supporting and complementary work

Poole, Artificial Intelligence: Foundations of Computational Agents (2017) provides supporting material that complements the primary references — readers comparing approaches will find useful framings, alternative notations, or extensions there.

Open methodological questions in artificial intelligence cluster around how to compose the techniques above under realistic constraints — scale, adversarial inputs, partial observability, and shifting workloads. The cited references give the precise statements, proofs, and empirical evaluations that this overview only sketches; downstream topic pages drill into specific subfields.

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  1. 01

    Search and Planning

    Uninformed and heuristic search, A*, and classical planning.

  2. 02

    Constraint Satisfaction

    CSPs, backtracking, arc consistency, and constraint programming.

  3. 03

    Knowledge Representation

    Logic, frames, semantic networks, and description logics.

  4. 04

    Knowledge Graphs

    Entity-relation graphs, ontologies, and KG embeddings.

  5. 05

    Automated Reasoning

    Inference engines and reasoning over symbolic knowledge.

  6. 06

    Probabilistic Reasoning

    Bayesian networks, factor graphs, and probabilistic graphical models.

  7. 07

    Game-Playing AI

    Minimax, MCTS, and AI agents for games.

  8. 08

    Multi-Agent Systems

    Game-theoretic and cooperative multi-agent design.

  9. 09

    Agent Architectures

    BDI agents, hierarchical agents, and modern LLM-based agents.

  10. 10

    LLM-Based Agents

    Tool-using, planning, and multi-step LLM agent systems.

  11. 11

    AI Safety

    Long-term safety, misuse, and existential-risk research.

  12. 12

    AI Ethics and Fairness

    Fairness, accountability, and ethics in AI systems.

  13. 13

    Explainable AI

    Methods for interpreting and explaining model predictions.

  14. 14

    Neurosymbolic AI

    Hybrid neural and symbolic reasoning systems.

  15. 15

    Cognitive Architectures

    SOAR, ACT-R, and integrated models of cognition.


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