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 comparative analysis formalization technical aspects.

Of course, the algorithmic point of view is privileged and for almost every considered problem, the goal is to design an algorithm capable of solving it. Examples play a crucial role in these notes: they have been chosen so as to guide in the conceptualization of pertinent abstractions for classes of problems. Digressions and remarks allow for an in-depth view of some of the topics and for the discovery of their relationship with other topics and other domains. Exercises are an essential complement to the topics treated, which cannot be understood and assimilated without solving them (solutions to the exercises are included in the final chapter). It is clear that the material treated here has already been discussed in other books. However, some of these topics are approached in an original manner in this book.

In addition to carrying out their original goal within a university syllabus, these pages will hopefully be agreeable to the reader and will also be an incentive to those wanting to know more and ask further questions.