Textbook of AI

1936–, Computer scientist

Bertram Raphael is an American computer scientist who, with Peter Hart and Nils Nilsson, co-authored the 1968 paper introducing A*. His 1964 MIT PhD thesis produced SIR, an early question-answering system that maintained a small relational database extracted from English input and answered queries by inference over its content, a forerunner of modern semantic-network and knowledge-base systems. He spent much of his career at SRI International on the Shakey robot project and later at Heuristics Inc.