Do the right thing - studies in limited rationality

As the cover blurb of this book points out, most intelligent systems face the same dilemma as the hero of Spike Lee’s film– knowing just what is the right thing to do. Previous theories of rationality are fine as far as they go, but they clearly do not go far enough. They assume that the decision maker has perfect information, and, even more unrealistically, has unlimited resources that may be applied to the problem of determining the elusive “right thing”. In contrast, Russell and Welfald address the far more challenging problem of establishing the best course of action under severe resource constraints, one of their applications being the construction of systems capable of reasoning about the best way to proceed in a game of table tennis, in real time.