Book excerpt: Readings in Artificial Intelligence focuses on the principles, methodologies, advancements, and approaches involved in artificial intelligence. The selection first elaborates on representations of problems of reasoning about actions, a problem similarity approach to devising heuristics, and optimal search strategies for speech understanding control. Discussions focus on comparison with existing speech understanding systems, empirical comparisons of the different strategies, analysis of distance function approximation, problem similarity, problems of reasoning about action, search for solution in the reduction system, and relationship between the initial search space and the higher level search space. The book then examines consistency in networks of relations, non-resolution theorem proving, using rewriting rules for connection graphs to prove theorems, and closed world data bases. The manuscript tackles a truth maintenance system, elements of a plan-based theory of speech acts, and reasoning about knowledge and action. Topics include problems in reasoning about knowledge, integration knowledge and action, models of plans, compositional adequacy, truth maintenance mechanisms, dialectical arguments, and assumptions and the problem of control. The selection is a valuable reference for researchers wanting to explore the field of artificial intelligence.