Textbook of AI

1933–2019, Computer scientist, AI textbook author

Also known as: Nils J. Nilsson

Nils John Nilsson was an American computer scientist who spent most of his career at SRI International and Stanford. With Peter Hart and Bertram Raphael he co-authored the 1968 paper that introduced A*. He led the Shakey robot project at SRI from 1966–1972, the first mobile robot able to reason about its actions, and the project that produced the STRIPS planning formalism (Fikes and Nilsson, 1971), still the basis of most modern symbolic planners.

Nilsson wrote three influential AI textbooks: Problem-Solving Methods in Artificial Intelligence (1971), Principles of Artificial Intelligence (1980), and Artificial Intelligence: A New Synthesis (1998). His historical The Quest for Artificial Intelligence (2009), written in retirement, is one of the most authoritative single-author histories of the field.

Nilsson chaired Stanford's Department of Computer Science from 1985 to 1990 and was president of AAAI (1982–1983).