"Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" by Russel&Norvig is one of the most used course books in AI. It covers basics of formal logic, search, making decisions, handling uncertainty etc. All at an introduction level, though, so for someone with many years of programming experience many of these things may be known already. As my adviser says: Once AI discovers something interesting, it becomes labeled something else or become a part of "standard computer science". I can recommended the book for an overview of the field and knowledge of the basic techniques, but not as something to read when game AI is the goal.
EDIT: I just looked through the table of contents again, and it does actually have useful topics in it.
I was so scarred by my godawful, incredibly academic, college AI course that I only remembered the bullshit that we actually covered in that course. Literally nothing in the course was worth wasting my time on, and it looks like we went purposefully around anything that might have been relevant or interesting.
It's baffling to me that two of the worst three computer science courses I took were AI and Algorithms & Data Structures. Both had mindbogglingly abstract, mathematically-oriented profs, who spent every lecture transcribing proofs from the textbook onto the blackboard. How do you teach a course on these subjects and have no assignments that involve writing code? This is at the place where BASIC was created, for chrissakes.
I had a very similar experience as you wrt AI and algorithms courses. Oddly enough, when I then (later) started exploring these more on my own I found them much more interesting.
