The book Artificial Intelligence, published in 1985 by Editura Tehnică, was one of the first works in Romania explicitly devoted to this field and marks my direct entry into the study of symbolic artificial intelligence and problem solving.
In the mid-1980s, artificial intelligence was only sparsely represented in Romanian specialist literature. At the time, this was practically the only book in Romania explicitly devoted to AI, in a context in which access to international publications was limited.
Internationally, AI was in the period of consolidation of the symbolic paradigm: problem solving, automated theorem proving, languages such as LISP, expert systems, and the first systematic reflections on knowledge representation.
The book was written together with Cristian Giumale. Chapters 1, 4, 5, and 6 are entirely my work, while Chapter 2 and part of Chapter 3 were written by Cristian Giumale.
The final chapter was added at the suggestion of Ion Iliescu, then director of Editura Tehnică, who considered it necessary to complete the book with an overall synthesis of the methods used to solve problems in artificial intelligence.
The book treats artificial intelligence as the science of constructing systems capable of solving problems through explicit and analysable mechanisms, rather than as an imitation of human intelligence. The emphasis falls on symbolic problem representation and on search and control strategies.
The work is organized into two broad parts: an introduction to the field and a presentation of problem-solving methods. Its central idea is that the intelligence of a system is determined by the way a problem is formulated and represented, not only by the algorithms being used.
The book belongs to the classical period of symbolic artificial intelligence, contemporary with the development of expert systems and languages oriented towards symbolic processing. Seen retrospectively, it establishes a conceptual framework that remains relevant beyond subsequent technological changes.
