Logical methods for AI
About
What this is
A free textbook on the logical foundations of AI, with the lecture slides and tutorial sheets that go with it. Read it, copy it, teach from it.
Logic is the study of correct reasoning: what makes an inference good or bad. Reasoning is a big part of what we call intelligent behavior, which is why logic sits at the base of AI as a discipline. This course follows that thread — how logical methods shaped AI, what they do in current research, and where they stop working.
Who it’s for
I wrote it for first-year AI students meeting formal logic for the first time. It assumes no more than secondary-school mathematics.
Working on your own? Start at Chapter 1 and go in order. The exercise sheets are worth attempting even without a tutor to hand out the solution passwords — the chapters work through plenty of examples.
Taking a course that uses this site? Read the chapter before the lecture, follow the slides during it, and do the tutorial sheet afterwards. Your education is in your own hands: what you get out of the course is what you put in.
Teaching your own course? Take it. The license lets you copy, translate, remix and re-teach any of it, as long as you say where it came from. Everything — pages, drawings, scripts, fonts — is public.
Using it
Course content is CC BY 4.0 (opens in a new tab) ; the code that builds the site is MIT (opens in a new tab) .
No accounts, no analytics, no tracking, and no cookies. Fonts, scripts and images are all served from this domain, so opening a page contacts nobody else. The embedded slide decks are the one exception: they live on Excalidraw’s servers, so they stay a button until you press it, and pressing it is what sends your IP address there.
A few settings are kept in your browser’s local storage so the site can remember them between visits: the light or dark theme you picked, your best score in the LaTeX drill, and which formula-builder levels you have finished. They never leave your computer, and clearing your browser data removes them. The site is hosted on GitHub Pages, which — like any web host — sees the IP address of requests it serves.
This is , who shows up throughout the book to point at things.
Where it comes from
The material grew out of Logical methods for AI, a first-year course in the AI bachelor’s programme (opens in a new tab) at Utrecht University, where I still teach it.
This is not an official Utrecht University publication. Nobody at the university has reviewed or approved it, and the mistakes in it are mine.
- MaintainerDeveloped and maintained by Johannes Korbmacher.
- ContributorsA growing list of people have improved this material.
- AI disclosureGenerative AI was used extensively in developing this course.
- Content licenceThe course is licensed under CC BY 4.0.
- Software licenceThe site code is licensed under MIT.
- SourceEvery page, asset and script is public on GitHub.
- Built withHugo, and hosted on GitHub Pages.
- Your dataNo accounts, no analytics, no tracking, no cookies. A few settings are stored in your own browser; embedded decks load only when you ask.
Sponsors
This page and course has been made possible by the support of:
Utrecht University's Interdisciplinary Education Programme
Utrecht University's focus area Human-centered Artificial Intelligence
NB: Even though the I use the website in my course, and it has been partially funded by the university, the website has no official ties to Utrecht University and is neither reviewed, approved, or the like by the university.