norvig/paip-lisp

This is an open-source repository for the book Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp by Peter Norvig (1992), and the code contained therein. The copyright has reverted to the author, who has shared it here under MIT license. On the list of most influential books for programmers. As seen on TV. See also: errata, comments, retrospective.

The book is available in these formats:

• we're generating ebooks - epub and pdf - from the markdown files, see Releases
• scanned pdfs
  • 4th edition, 1998: higher resolution, better OCR, smaller file thanks to better compression
  • 6th edition, 2001: newer printing
• text: PAIP.txt (from OCR'ing the scanned pdf, containing many errors)
• a source epub: see releases for a cleaned up version downloaded from Safari (much cleaner than the scanned versions)
• and chapter?.md markdown files:

Table of Contents

• Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming
  • Front matter
  • Preface
• Part I: Introduction to Common Lisp
  • 1 Introduction to Lisp
  • 2 A Simple Lisp Program
  • 3 Overview of Lisp
• Part II: Early AI Programs
  • 4 GPS: The General problem Solver
  • 5 Eliza: Dialog with a Machine
  • 6 Building Software Tools
  • 7 Student: Solving Algebra Word Problems
  • 8 Symbolic Mathematics: A Simplification Program
• Part III: Tools and Techniques
  • 9 Efficiency Issues
  • 10 Low-Level Efficiency Issues
  • 11 Logic Programming
  • 12 Compiling Logic programs
  • 13 Object-Oriented Programming
  • 14 Knowledge Representation and Reasoning
• Part IV: Advanced AI Programs
  • 15 Symbolic Mathematics with Canonical Forms
  • 16 Expert Systems
  • 17 Line-Diagram Labeling by Constraint Satisfaction
  • 18 Search and the Game of Othello
  • 19 Introduction to Natural Language
  • 20 Unification Grammars
  • 21 A Grammar of English
• Part V: The Rest of Lisp
  • 22 Scheme: An Uncommon Lisp
  • 23 Compiling Lisp
  • 24 ANSI Common Lisp
  • 25 Troubleshooting

The Lisp Files

The Lisp code files are listed here:

Running the Code

There is no single "application" to run. Rather, there is a collection of source code files, duplicating the code in the book. You can read and/or run whatever you like. Lisp is an interactive language, and you will need to interact with the code to get benefit from it. Some hints:

• You will need a Common Lisp interpreter/compiler/environment. Here's a discussion of the options.
• You will always need (load "auxfns.lisp").
• You will need (requires "file"), for the various instances of file that you want to use. (If requires does not work properly on your system you may have to alter its definition, in auxfns.lisp.
• The function do-examples, which takes as an argument either :all or a chapter number or a list of chapter numbers, can be used to see examples of the use of various functions. For example, (do-examples 1) shows the examples from chapter 1. Access this by doing (requires "examples").

Other resources

• I wrote a retrospective on the book in 2002.
• There is a nice Python version of the code, by Daniel Connelly at Georgia Tech, supervised by Ashok Goel.