Artificial Intelligence is all the rage right now, although not many people know what it is and how far it's been developed. If there is a thinking, reasoning computer out there, the boffins are keeping it pretty quiet - it's definitely not the C64. Let's look at the book, anyway.

The author begins with an introduction to the concept of Artificial Intelligence (AI) - what it is, how it can be used, and perhaps most relevant, how and why you can run AI programs on the humble C64. I think it was at this point that I began to disagree with him.

Each chapter consists of a brief explanation of the topic under discussion, and then attempts to illustrate the concepts involved by means of Basic programs. Hence, we start with intelligent games, in which Mr. O'Malley goes into the historical and practical details of chess, checkers (Draughts to us Brits), Othello, and Backgammon - hardly examples of AI.

Following this there are three Basic programs to type in. About the most interesting of these is a program which plots a path through a maze. Nim, a game where you have to pick matches from a pile, leaving your opponent with the last one is surpassed in its capacity to bore only by the brain-numbing Life, the third in the trio.

To be fair to the author he has managed to introduce aspects of AI programming into the games, but these kinds of examples are meant to enhance, not detract from the text.

From intelligent games we move onto more serious stuff. Bootstraps - programs which modify parts of themselves as they run, are illustrated with two stunningly boring programs which do indeed modify themselves, but do little else of practical value. Natural Language processing (making the computer understand English) is a slightly more interesting subject.

This chapter contains a version of Eliza, Joseph Weizenbaum's famous program which gives human like responses to phrases input by the user. There is also another good program which runs along similar lines, but draws logical deductions from your input using set theory.

Apart from that one chapter, there is little else to recommend this book to me. The subject would be a lot more interesting if it had been dealt with in greater depth and the program examples do little to rescue it. In fact, the two most useful programs in the book are a word processor and a graphics utility, though quite why these have been included I'm not altogether sure.

A fairly, dull, uninteresting book.