Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach book

Six years is the period, after that your knowledge should be refreshed. Seems it is time for study again.

And the book is:
Peter Norvig's and Stuart Russell's book on AI.

First chapter is more about history of the AI problem, rather than on AI methods itself.

At the end of this chapter,some tasks for the personal explorations presented.

The first (1.1) question in the book is to define Intelligence, AI, and agent.

My Answers (IMHO):
Intelligence is the ability to make rational decisions, depending of the environment state, act with this decisions, and transfer decisions, and methods of problem solving in the form of message that can be interpreted by others.

This ability of transforming thoughts is key feature,which differs humans from animals. Seems that without this feature society will be primitive still.

As to the Artificial Intelligence, it seems that for artificial entity, that can repair itself (so it is no reason to transfer experience) this may be not necessary.

Q: "Act rationally".
A: Formally it is maximization of the utility function (or objective function) , depending from the task of the Agent. The problem so is what is the goal function for self-reacting device? It seems that there are lack of definition.
I'll define the main goal function of such agent as survival. For example, algorithm for the prediction of the quote on financial market, will survive only if this algorithm predicts well.

Q: Definition of an Agent.
A: The agent is something that maximizes its goal function (That is survival, as defined).It seems there are no self-destroying Agents.

Well, further I'll try to describe my thoughts on the other questions.

At the end some links related to the questions in the first chapter of the book.

jabberwacky bot (some kind of Joan bot, that won bronze on last chatbots competition)
(Example of talk with this bot:
Me:I am thinking about ability of machine to think. May be you know something about it?
Bot: I'd bet it's got some sort of extremely rare spice in it or something.
Me:My name is Roman. And You?
Bot:You know my name.
Me:And what is it?
Bot:What's my name?
Me:Definitely.
Bot:I said boys or girls.
Me:?
Bot:Don't be. *Hug*.
Me:So what are your thoughts on artificial intelligence?
Bot:I have infiltrated your computer and infected your drive processor.
Me:Are you joking?
Bot:Is your face joking?
not very like human, that tries to act like human, if it knows about jury, isn't it?)

Loebner Prize (chat bot competition, for Turing test completion)

http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/TuringArticle.html - Alan Turing article, that defined research for the past 50 years.