Long before neural networks, computer scientists asked a bold question: can a machine be made to reason? Classical artificial intelligence is the answer they built — the art of getting a computer to search, plan, deduce and play by manipulating symbols and exploring possibilities. It is how a program beats you at chess, solves a Sudoku, plots a route, or works out what must be true from what it already knows.

This branch covers intelligent agents, uninformed and heuristic search (including A*), adversarial game-playing (minimax and alpha–beta pruning), constraint satisfaction, logic and knowledge representation, automated planning, and reasoning under uncertainty — the bridge to machine learning.