Bota's Journey: AI Across the Steppe

Cover: Bota the robot and Aru ride along a steppe road toward the Almaty mountains under a red sun. Title: Bota's Journey, AI Across the Steppe.
QAIRU · AI Fundamentals (AIF1303) · EndTerm Creative Project 2026 Authors: Nurdaulet & Mustafa Start reading: Prologue →

How to read this book

Each chapter matches one week of the AI Fundamentals course and one stop on Bota's road trip across Kazakhstan. A chapter has the same rhythm every time:

  1. Manga scene. A story moment that raises a real AI question.
  2. Plain-words explanation. The idea without jargon, for readers with no AI background.
  3. The real thing. Definitions, formulas and pseudocode exactly as engineers write them.
  4. Worked example. Every number is calculated step by step, and the calculations were checked with code.
  5. Try it! A live demo. It runs the real algorithm in your browser, not a pre-recorded animation.
  6. Did You Know? + Mini-quiz. Facts, history, myths, and questions with explained answers.

Look at the map: Bota's route zigzags across the whole country. That is on purpose. Bota isn't looking for the shortest road to Almaty but for the city that teaches the next lesson, and Chapter 5 explains why that still counts as rational.

New terms are underlined in red when they first appear and are collected in the Glossary.

The Cast

Character sheet: Bota the small white robot, Aru the student in a red blazer, Max with spiky hair and a red scarf.

Bota

A brand-new robot agent. Curious and brave, and it learns by trying. Its name means "baby camel" in Kazakh, a little traveller of the steppe.

Aru

An AI student from Astana and Bota's mentor. She explains every algorithm and checks every number twice.

Max

A game champion from Balkhash. He always assumes his opponent plays perfectly, just like the minimax algorithm he is named after.

Table of Contents