Schalkoff (Clemson U.) introduces the theoretical and practical foundations of intelligent systems and the technology it uses, for students who are at least a little familiar with discrete mathematics and modern programming languages such as C. Among his topics are search and computational complexity, structural approaches leading to natural language understanding and related topics, representing and manipulating uncertainty, neural networks as biologically inspired computing, and genetic algorithms and other evolutionary computing concepts. Chapter-end exercises are provided. Annotation ©2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)