Comp.ai is a moderated newsgroup whose topic is Artificial Intelligence.
It has existed since the early days of USENET (at least 10 years) and
has been a moderated newsgroup since 5th May 1999.  An introduction for 
new readers including the official charter, moderation policies and
posting guidelines may be found at <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~dnk/comp.ai>.
The current moderator is David Kinny, but the actual moderation is done
largely automatically by an intelligent :-) agent (the AI-mod-bot).
 
The group is meant for general discussion of AI topics (but not about
those for which specialized subgroups already exist), including:
 
o  announcements of AI conferences, reports, books, products and jobs.
o  questions and discussion about AI theory and practice, algorithms,
     systems and applications, problems, history and future trends.
o  distribution of AI source code (preferably indirectly by weblinks)
 
All contributions should be of potential interest to the general AI 
community, and in English plain text without attachments.  See part 2 
of this FAQ for a list of other more specialized newsgroups and lists.

Every so often, somebody posts an inflammatory message, such as

   Will computers every really think?
   AI hasn't done anything worthwhile.

These "religious" issues serve no real purpose other than to waste
bandwidth. If you feel the urge to respond to such a post, please do
so through a private e-mail message, or post redirecting follow-ups to
comp.ai.philosophy.  We suspect this will be less of a problem now
that the group is moderated.

We've tried to minimize the overlap with the FAQ postings to the
comp.lang.lisp, comp.lang.prolog, comp.ai.neural-nets, and
comp.ai.shells newsgroups, so if you don't find what you're looking
for here, we suggest you try the FAQs for those newsgroups. These FAQs
should be available by anonymous ftp in subdirectories of

   ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/

or by sending a mail message to mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu with subject
"help". http://www.faqs.org/ has a nice webified version.