Essentials of Artificial Intelligence

Imagine what it must have been like to be a physicist in Newton’s day. I mean it. Close this book, set it aside, and think about it. From a modern point of view, they didn’t know anything. The problems and challenges faced by a physicist in the sixteenth century weren’t any easier than those faced today, but they were tremendously more accessible —it’s a lot easier to explain F = ma to a person on the street than it is to explain the intricacies of quantum field theory. It was an age of scientific romanticism; the accessibility of the problems meant that revolutions in thinking could—and typically did—rest on the shoulders of individual researchers of exceptional insight and imagination.