Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach
Russell and Norvig organised the field around one idea, the intelligent agent that perceives its environment and acts in it.
Why it matters
Scattered approaches acquired a common frame, and AI is still taught from this book.
The agent frame was meant to let search, logic, probability, learning and perception be presented as answers to one question rather than as separate traditions; that is the authors' design. Martha Pollack, who had taught from the book for two years, wrote in a 1995 review that its value depends little on this frame and that in lectures she spends almost no time on the agent theme, because the link is at places strained. The book shifted the emphasis noticeably from symbolic reasoning toward probability and learning before that shift had happened in the research itself. It has run through several editions and is translated into dozens of languages.