Read Norvig's introductory text, but don't feel you have to know it all - use it as a way to pick something you really are interested in (genetic algorithms are

Read Norvig's introductory text, but don't feel you have to know it all - use it as a way to pick something you really are interested in (genetic algorithms are always popular) and read academic literature on the topic (citeseer is a good resource here). Use Wikipedia, Scholarpedia. Get an intuitive sense of dynamical systems, problem spaces and landscapes, and chaos theory. Get a grip on combinatorial explosion, and just how much it can suck for optimization problems. Learn theory of computation, and glance (more than once) at symbolic logic. That will set you on your way! Good luck, it is fascinating stuff.