The AAAI site offers a layman's introduction to AI, at . Good books for this purpose include David Stork's "Hal's Legacy," with nontechnical essays by luminaries such as Ray Kurzweil, Roger Schank, Douglas Lenat, Azriel Rosenfeld, Donald Norman, Rosalind Picard, and Daniel Dennett. Other inspiring books include "Robo Sapiens" and "Godel, Escher, Bach." [Vincent J. Perricelli and David Finton , comp.ai, 01Nov00.]

For a good survey of existing architectures for intelligence, see R.W. Pew and A.S. Mavor, "Modeling Human and Organizational Behavior: Application to military simulations" (National Academy Press, 1998). [Randy Jones , comp.ai.games, 27Sep00.]

Dimiter Dobrev has written a short paper on the formal definition of AI, at . It is more mathematical than philosophical. [, comp.ai, 23Nov00.]

The UK's Royal Institution (dating back to the 17th Century) has chosen AI scientist Kevin Warwick of Reading U. to give its Science Christmas lectures for young audiences. Prof. Warwick is known for "articles in the popular press about how robots will take over the world in the near future, and more recently for implanting the chip off a smart card into his upper arm..." His series of five lectures is titled 'Robots, Cyborgs: The future for humans?". The series will be televised. . [Ruth Aylett , comp.ai, 29Sep00.]

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