Book excerpt: Fundamentals of Artificial Intelligence introduces the foundations of present day AI and provides coverage to recent developments in AI such as Constraint Satisfaction Problems, Adversarial Search and Game Theory, Statistical Learning Theory, Automated Planning, Intelligent Agents, Information Retrieval, Natural Language & Speech Processing, and Machine Vision. The book features a wealth of examples and illustrations, and practical approaches along with the theoretical concepts. It covers all major areas of AI in the domain of recent developments. The book is intended primarily for students who major in computer science at undergraduate and graduate level but will also be of interest as a foundation to researchers in the area of AI.