Logic for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence

Preface

These notes result from a certain conception of knowledge transmission and from the experience gained after several years of teaching at the Grenoble Institute of Technology (Ensimag).

If the table of contents is interpreted too literally, the task at hand is infeasible: each of the themes developed in the different chapters has been the topic of thousands of pages (books, monographs, articles, popularization books, etc.) published by numerous authors, and some of these pages are of the highest scientific quality. On top of this, we must consider all the information available on the Internet.

The aim of these notes, which is probably ambitious but hopefully not disproportionate, is to attempt to provide a unified overview of the concepts and techniques that are useful in many well-identified domains of modern computer science and artificial intelligence. It is difficult to find all these topics in the same document, and they should also be a good starting point for a reader wishing to explore further topics.

Conceptual rigor will always be preferred to formal rigor. This approach is essential for the transmission of knowledge in the modern world, especially for those domains in which the readers will have to keep acquiring additional knowledge throughout their professional life.

The presentation method of all the topics will always be the same: informal description of the topic under consideration (motivation) historical background examples possible conceptualizations ...