[rramadass]

This is nice; I am more interested in first understanding the origins/concepts/ideas behind AI/ML than in all the complicated mechanisms involved in implementing them (i.e. the simplest possible explanation/implementation) and hence these sort of books really interest me.

Any more recommendations?

PS: You might find Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology by Valentino Braitenberg interesting if you don't already know of it.

[robg]

I was raised on this era - you could go down quite the rabbit hole branching out from McClelland and Geoff Hinton. They were trying to reflect the brain and so backprop was initially seen as a shortcut that could be done away with once more complex models could be supported by processing power and inputs.