I'd spend my money on these two:
- The Emotion Machine by Minsky
- Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom
Ask HN: Best books on AI?
81–90 of 95 posts
Re: Ask HN: Best books on AI?
#82AI is not a field where the practitioners can safely ignore the academic. A huge number of people got into rabbit-holes in its history and basically failed completely and wasted decades of their lives, in some cases.
Anecdotal. Do you have specific records of such failures?
I still wonder if the many who spent years on obtaining the Loebner would be considered a "failure" in this domain ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loebner_Prize - I think no matter how much you read about AI or look into the rabbit hole you will always end up in some type of Chinese room argument ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
Re: Ask HN: Best books on AI?
#83Sometimes its best to answer a question with a question.
Are you simply curious or is there something more pressing? For example, do you want some light reading or have you perhaps been asked to implement machine learning for your company?
Most answers here assume you want to jump into the ML swamp and start analyzing your trove of "big data" ASAP. But is that so?
Re: Ask HN: Best books on AI?
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence by Peter Norvig much more than AIMA, which I found excessively encyclopedic and shallow. While some will argue it is dated, I think it presents many timeless ideas that will get in vogue soon with little tweaks to their inference schemes. Same for The Art of Prolog.
Art of Prolog was over of the best books I've read. As Prolog itself is one of my favorite languages. I wish there were more of both.
CTM by Van Roy & Haridi?
Re: Ask HN: Best books on AI?
#85You cannot really go practical in AI without academic rigor. You can do recipes of what's already been done using a TensorFlow book, but that's how far one can go. If one is serious in getting in AI today, a great way to do is read the following books, in order: 1. AI: A Modern Approach by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig. 2. Deep Learning by Ian Goodfellow and Yoshua Bengio. It is amazing how approachable both books…
Sutton & Barto's Reinforment Learning complete this triumvirate https://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~sutton/book/the-book-2nd.htm... David Silver's Reinforcement Course is based on Sutton & Barto https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pWv7GOvuf0
I liked all three of them. I also feel Murphy's MLAPP provides additional useful material and is well written.
Re: Ask HN: Best books on AI?
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anecdotal. Do you have specific records of such failures?
I still wonder if the many who spent years on obtaining the Loebner would be considered a "failure" in this domain ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loebner_Prize - I think no matter how much you read about AI or look into the rabbit hole you will always end up in some type of Chinese room argument ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
After listening to him for a bit, reading some of his books, annoying him a fair amount, I think that my opinion of J Searle is that he doesn't know jack shit about AI.
Gedankenexperiment as a methodology has had considerable success in physics and miserable, complete, ridiculous, awful failure in psychology and cognitive science.
Re: Ask HN: Best books on AI?
#87Some on this thread have recommended Norvig's PAIP, but that's kind of an old school AI book in that it focuses on heuristic search and logic (implementing prolog in lisp at one point, very impressive stuff actually); but is lacking any coverage of statistical machine learning, which is the approach that underlies most of the cool stuff these days. It's still a great book, but I'd instead recommend a path that focuse…
Hi Karl, I just read through your very intersting post about the sabbatical. I 've been thinking about this a while too. I see that you are currently in a A.I role at umich, I was wondering you have written anything about how you went about actually landing a role in this particular field. Thank you.
Long story short, I became aware of the position through networking in the tech/startup community in Ann Arbor, and eventually got introduced to an ML prof who knows the profs who are actually running the lab. I applied to the position with a resume and cover letter customized to relevance of the role (compressed a lot of startup / product / leadership stuff down, went into more details on tech stuff, emphasized ML studies, excitement for mission of their lab) and met with the profs a few times and it worked out.
If I can extract any advice from this, it's that putting yourself out there and letting the world / your network know that you are interested in something or working towards something (in my case: a transition to a career applying ML), things might turn up. Also: if you have more experience you should feel comfortable completely customizing your resume to the role so you have one page jam packed with relevance; it's ok if they don't see (or won't care) about some of your experience.
I also notice that in some of your previous HN discussion you lamenting companies not really looking at your open source work; it's annoying that they wouldn't take the chance to look. But if I were you I might highlight specific projects on your resume relevant to the role you are applying to if you haven't been doing this already; this could elevate your open source work to job experience in its emphasis. Assume 99% of people will only see your resume, everything else should be supporting resources in case they get interested enough to look (or wish to validate your claims).
Re: Ask HN: Best books on AI?
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nothing is counted as an AI task after someone finally manages to do it.
I anticipated that argument, but I wouldn't have considered ASR an AI task even before it was first attempted.
Any particular reason why? I feel that the problem of mapping sensory inputs like sound etc onto internal concepts for reasoning is an important part of AI.
Re: Ask HN: Best books on AI?
#89If you are developing AI for games, then Programming Game AI By Example by Mat Buckland are one of the best book for that : https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Example-Wordware-Develope...
I can also vouch for this, it's a great introduction to AI in Games, however it is just an introduction as the topic is very broad.
Re: Ask HN: Best books on AI?
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
I anticipated that argument, but I wouldn't have considered ASR an AI task even before it was first attempted.
Any particular reason why? I feel that the problem of mapping sensory inputs like sound etc onto internal concepts for reasoning is an important part of AI.
My personal reason is that I don't consider the output of speech recognition to be "internal concepts for reasoning". In a Spoken Dialog System, this task is typically performed by a subsequent component that does natural language understanding (rather than recognition).