Textbook of AI

1941–, Computer scientist

Also known as: Peter E. Hart

Peter E. Hart is an American computer scientist who, with Nils Nilsson and Bertram Raphael at SRI International (then Stanford Research Institute), co-authored the 1968 paper A Formal Basis for the Heuristic Determination of Minimum Cost Paths, introducing the A* search algorithm. A* combines the cost-so-far g(n) of Dijkstra's algorithm with a heuristic estimate h(n) of the cost-to-go to evaluate nodes by f(n) = g(n) + h(n), and is optimal whenever h is admissible. The algorithm is now ubiquitous in robotics, route planning, video games and theorem proving.

Hart's other contributions include the SRI Shakey the robot project, the first mobile robot able to reason about its actions, and the influential 1973 textbook Pattern Classification and Scene Analysis (with Richard Duda), one of the foundational texts of modern machine learning. He went on to lead the Artificial Intelligence Center at SRI and later founded Ricoh Innovations.