Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming - Finished!

I’ve finished reading Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming: Case Study in Common Lisp. On the whole, the book was a slog (bought it 4 months ago), just like its name. A top quality slog, but reading large chunks of Lisp while not taking the time to enter each program and getting a feel for how it “works” was hard.

The historic perspective and evolutions of early AI programming was fantastic. I loved the section on natural grammar/parsing, and the impact of how you store your “ model data” impacting how you can process the input, made a lot of sense. Before reading that section, I had spent a few nights grappling with how I wanted to parse text, and how I’d store my knowledge and I was getting mentally caught up in the chicken - egg of it all, so it seemed very timely after that to read how it was really tricky (Chapter 14 - Knowledge Representation and Reasoning).

Now that I have read the book, and gotten an overall comprehension of what it covers, I look forward to using it as a reference for learn Lisp and for fundamentals of AI development.

One of my takes one the whole Lisp front, is that it is really nice the idea of not having to have every thing strongly typed up front. Seeing how solutions organically evolve is quite a strong argument for dynamic languages. I also really liked how functional composition stacks blocks of doing together to make a greater whole.