The purpose of this book is to provide an up-to-date and didactically coherent introduction to the principles and programming methods of artificial intelligence. It is appropriate for an undergraduate or first-year graduate course. While it is possible for the student to get acquainted with artificial intelligence in a single quarter or semester, a sequence of two to three quarters or semesters is preferable. The author covers most of the material in two academic quarters at the University of Washington. During the first quarter, Chapters 1 through 6 or 7 are tackled, laying a foundation of symbol manipulation, knowledge representation and inference. The second quarter takes on the more advanced topics: learning, natural language understanding, vision and the integration of AI technology into expert systems.