The area, or should one say discipline, of artificial intelligence is by no means new, but has now moved out of the research laboratory with a vengeance and is rapidly becoming a foundation for thousands of new computing and technological applications. As with anything to do with computers and technology, it is an area that is evolving very fast and its vocabulary is evolving quite as rapidly with it. Dictionaries, therefore, become out‐of ‐date very quickly and it is necessary for libraries to be very much on the ball in updating this part of their reference collections. Many such dictionaries are intended for those already working in the field, and the definitions can be completely over the head of the ordinary computer user. This particular one, however, is intended for all disciplines ‐ business, science, education and engineering ‐ and this is reflected in the style and language of the definitions which are much more understandable than many. It also claims to be the first up‐to‐date dictionary on this subject: this is a slightly perplexing claim as one would expect a new work to be up‐to‐date (no‐one purposely offers a new out‐of‐date reference work, do they?), and if they mean a first in this area then this is not true as there have been others, though all are now pretty well obsolete, it is true.
The dictionary contains over 2,500 entries which have been compiled by trawling the Internet and extracting both the vocabulary and the explanations from the many Web pages that deal with artificial intelligence and related topics.
Each word is both defined and explained (there is an important distinction here as so often definitions may be correct but leave the reader no wiser), often with illustrative examples.
There are numerous cross‐references and the volume also has an annotated bibliography and an appendix that lists the Web sites, both general and specific, that offer information on the latest trends in artificial intelligence.
While not really suitable for a complete layman, though a number of general computing terms are included, this dictionary would be very useful in any academic institution that teaches/researches in this subject, and would also be of interest to those practitioners who wish to keep up‐to‐date with the vocabulary of the developments in artificial intelligence. The price is quite reasonable for a hardback reference book of this type.
