Publisher's Synopsis
This exploration of the relationships between artificial intelligence (AI) and software engineering circumscribes the limitations of current commercial AI, and investigates the full potential of AI for practical software. Since it is now widely accepted that AI is a desirable ingredient in many software engineering applications, the commercial and educational appeal of a harmonious blend of these hitherto-conflicting methodologies will be of value to the software engineering industry, as well as the information technology business.;The book argues that practical software which uses the full promise of AI must be developed in the absence of the touchstones of conventional software engineering - complete specification of the problem, and a well-defined procedure for evaluating implementations. It develops a methodology that combines the best of both disciplines, discusses the effective communication of an AI project, and presents software engineering techniques for a discipline of incremental development of AI software. This text is an important link between two fields which have almost no previous connections.;Finally, it sounds a warning about the societal problems that an ill-considered rush to implement AI software could engender in terms of an escalation of the software crisis.
