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Algorithms for Decision Making
- massinstall 6y agoAt first sight an amazing book, thank you!
- Trex_Egg 6y agoThank you for this book
- mud_dauber 6y agoThis looks awesome. Thank you!
- goldenManatee 6y agoThank you. I’ve been hoping for a book like this for a while.
- nmca 6y agoThis looks very good from my skim! It includes state-of-the-art approaches like Actor-Critic with MCTS and loads of recent and interesting things like GAIL and SMILE. The areas where I have expertise superficially seem like good treatments. I'll have to see what other RLers think and perhaps use it to study up on belief states :) Much more up-to-date than sutton and barto, but the authors are rather less well known.
- gumby 6y agoAnyone who likes this would enjoy George Polya's short book. "How to Solve it" which these days is widely available as a pdf.
- Zerith 6y agoWould love to have a kindle version.
- pge 6y agoI think Calibre can convert from pdf to kindle format
- Gravyness 6y agoHow is something so useful so available? Is it the karma from past year?
- dukeofdoom 6y agoLets say I wanted to verify a student read a page of text from a novel. And I wanted to automatically generate a question from that text. Any algorithms that can currently do that?
- quarok 6y agoIf you wanted to do Cloze questions, you can use saveall.ai (a tool that I built) to generate them automatically from fragments of texts. We also plan to work on automatically generating questions from a larger chunk of text, but it is very difficult. Some people have had some success with GPT-3 but it's unreliable
- mikesabbagh 6y agoI dont know about you, but I have been trying to cover this topic for some time, but it is very difficult to assimilate. Like many, i am a self learned developer, I do have higher education in sciences and the math is tough to me but I can understand what they are talking about. Still those algorithms are challenging
- joubert 6y agoI can also recommend "Algorithms to Live By", by Brian Christian & Tom Griffiths. https://www.amazon.com/Algorithms-Live-Computer-Science-Decisions/dp/1627790365 https://www.amazon.com/Algorithms-Live-Computer-Science-Deci... Super accessible.
- OkGoDoIt 6y agoYeah, that was a really great book. Also has a well-produced narration available on Audible that I listened to. I recommend it.
- dundercoder 6y agoI love this book. Listened to it 4-5 times. Lots of really practical application
- alexpetralia 6y agoSuch a good book. I learned so much about life from the multi-armed bandit problem.
- ab-dm 6y agoReading this at the moment! Fantastic book and easy to read
- jacobrussell 6y agoI still think about this book every time I get on Zillow. Great chapter on buying a home.
- aiprof 6y agoI recommend that one to my students. I also recommend Brian's new book titled "The Alignment Problem" and it is cited in the book.
- chrisweekly 6y agoYes! ATLB is fantastic!
- xkgt 6y agoI bumped into this accidentally having ever heard of it. It is one of those pleasures of browsing through a library. Lovely book, easy to understand with a broad range of topics and insights. Recommended!
- 13415 6y agoIs a print version of this book available or planned for the near future?
- huitzitziltzin 6y agoThe first author (MK) also wrote "Algorithms for Optimization" (MIT Press), which is also implemented in (and is a nice guide to) the Julia language, which is itself a pretty sweet language.
- Mageek 6y ago*first two authors (MK and TW) wrote Alg4Opt This new book is in the same format.
- cashsterling 6y agoI highly recommend this book. I am 100% going to buy their next book too. Julia is an awesome language and the ecosystem around it is getting better quickly.
- mkaic 6y agoMykel Kochenderfer is my uncle! He does some really cool research up at Stanford. Lots of autonomous quadcopter drones doing automatic maneuvers and learning how to not crash into each other. It’s cool to get to see his work on HN!
- E-Reverance 6y agoSince you had an Ask HN regarding machine learning resources, and your uncle has written some machine learning papers, have you considered asking him to teach you or is he really busy?
- mkaic 6y agoI have talked to him about it, actually! He gave me some great course recommendations that I plan on looking into. Ask HN was mostly motivated by wanting to get multiple data points/opinions.
- mikaeluman 6y agoLooks very good. Can’t believe we can just download the entire pdf free of charge. So helpful !
- Mageek 6y agoThe authors plan to have the book be free, online, forever!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- sudobanban 6y agoSuch great resource! Huge props to the authors for making this freely available.
- jturpin 6y agoDoes anyone have any advice on how to make the most out of books like these? I'm trying to read more textbooks in subjects that I really phoned in during college this year. My current strategy is to make some note cards and take notes (which is kind of tedious), wondering if anyone has any advice as to their own workflows.
- late2part 6y agoI typically take a book like this and read it. Then I think about it. I also think about it as I read it. I ask my friends in person and online if they've read and talk with them about it. Sometimes I'll look for online forums which discuss the book. This is how I make the most out of books like these.
- Dzugaru 6y agoAs a programmer I usually try to implement some of the algorithms in language of my choice and throw them at some toy problems (it's good there is no shortage of interesting toy problems in this field). It was really fun with Artificial Intelligence: Modern Approach book (ex: implementing a SAT solver from scratch and solving Minesweeper by pure logic is very satisfying).
- nefitty 6y agoAnki is basically the most efficient method to study facts. I use a gamified version called Memrise.
- sgt101 6y agoGet in a group. Work is a good place to do this. Pick out some books, send a mail round saying that you are running a tech book group. Get folks together and read a chapter a week (this is hard in reality - be cool with everyone and sometimes let chapters slip over a few weeks). Every week someone leads the discussion. Every week someone volunteers to do the next weeks. You meet for an hour to discuss.
- abnry 6y agoMy suggestions, not for this book in particular but technical textbooks in general: - Get very familiar with the table of contents first. Then note and filter out the sections you are less interested in or don't appear to provide the biggest bang for your buck. - Annotate, annotate, annotate. Active reading is better than passive reading. I use a 2-in-1 chromebook and a passive pen to highlight in the adobe pdf reader. - Write detailed notes in addition to annotating (i.e. in a separate notebook or markdown file). Cull/convert your notes into Anki/Memrise digital flashcards. Drill on your phone when you are lying in bed.
- sncsy 6y agoAny way to get an epub version so I can load on Kindle with navigable chapters?
- bhattisatish 6y agoJulia Notebooks containing the source code from the book is available at https://github.com/sisl/algforopt-notebooks https://github.com/sisl/algforopt-notebooks
- T-A 6y agoLooks like a different book, "Algorithms for Optimization", by two of the three authors of "Algorithms for Decision Making".
- isoprophlex 6y agoIncredible depth and clarity! Authors, if you're reading this, thanks a thousand for making this available to us!
- aiprof 6y agoSure thing! We wanted to get feedback from the broad community so that we can make it as awesome as possible before it goes to print. ;-)
- currymj 6y agothis book describes the linear programming formulation for finding the optimal value function. cool to see, I think this formulation is underrated by the CS community compared to other communities also trying to solve MDPs. however I wish it also described the dual of this linear program. this problem involves optimizing over state-action frequencies which is equivalent to optimizing over policies. so value functions and policies are dual to each other. that's pretty neat! not sure why modern RL texts don't talk about it at all.
- FabHK 6y agoThe title reminded me of this anecdote (which I can't locate now, might have been somewhere in Kahneman's or Ariely's recent oeuvre): This associate professor of Decision Theory received two offers of tenure track positions at reputable universities, and got some friends and colleagues together to discuss which one to take. One of them suggested he use the tools of his discipline, Decision Theory, to help him make a decision. To which the professor replies: "Now, come on guys, this is serious..."
- Pamar 6y agoI link at the source of this anecdote at the end of my essay on I-Ching: https://www.pa-mar.net/Lifestyle/I-Ching.html https://www.pa-mar.net/Lifestyle/I-Ching.html Here is the direct link if you don't care about my stuff (it has been featured on HN already) http://statweb.stanford.edu/~cgates/PERSI/papers/thinking.pdf http://statweb.stanford.edu/~cgates/PERSI/papers/thinking.pd...
- FabHK 6y agoThanks for that source, a talk by frightfully brilliant Stanford mathematician and magician Persi Diaconis. It contains another cute anecdote: > One of my most endearing memories of the great psychol- ogist of decision making under uncertainty, Amos Tversky, recalls his way of ordering in restaurants: “Barbara? What do I want?”
- Pamar 6y ago;) the whole piece is really a fantastic read.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y agoThis looks neat, but anyone interested should know there's also a whole mature field to solve similar problems. The field of control theory has some really simple and really robust methods for getting a system from state A to state B. If you aren't trying to learn how the system works simultaneous to your algorithm being deployed, it can be a really a good fit. This book and control theory solve different problems. I'm just commenting because I sometimes see modern ML folks trying to apply super duper general techniques to problems that are easily solved specifically with simple undergrad-level techniques from the specific fields (including this material to control problems). Also, I just think control theory is really cool and perhaps under-discussed in "cool math/eng stuff" circles.
- dimatura 6y agoAfter the basic PID controller, what would you consider the most useful tools for control?
- tshaddox 6y agoI know virtually nothing about control theory, but when I was into RC quadcopters back around 2011 I know Kalman filters got name dropped a lot. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalman_filter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalman_filter
- aiprof 6y agoKalman filters and variations are covered in Ch. 19. It can be viewed as a special case of belief updating in a partially observable Markov decision process.
- thx2099100 6y agothe next step after PID control is state-space based control. it's not a single tool but more of a framework. it goes beyond frequency based representations and can also model non-linear control problems. the kalman filter is an example of the use of this framework where it's combined with statistics. the problem in control theory though is that once you want to go beyond linear control things get very difficult, most of the literature seems to be about finding clever ways of approximating your problem into something linear.
- de6u99er 6y agoI hope you have considered racial bias. e.g.: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03228-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03228-6 or: https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/07/17/1005396/predictive-policing-algorithms-racist-dismantled-machine-learning-bias-criminal-justice/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/07/17/1005396/predicti... or: https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/can-racist-algorithms-be-fixed https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/can-racist-algorithm...
- aiprof 6y agoThis is a very important dimension. See Sec. 1.5 of the book. There is also a side reference to a book that discusses this and other societal implications.
- ZoomZoomZoom 6y agoIt's a minor nitpick, but anyway, what's up with naming your pdf files like this 'dm.pdf'? What's wrong with 'Algorithms_for_Decision_Making.pdf' of even adding the 'Mykel_Kochenderfer,Tim_Wheeler,Kyle_Wray_-_' prefix? I can't put a proper name in a "save" dialog until I open the book, and I need to save it first! I sound so annoyed because I recently downloaded 'hist.pdf', 'fxtbook.pdf' and 'V090212S.pdf' Is it just to get a memorable file URL? If so, humanity invented simlinks long ago.
- randomswede 6y agoWild guess is that the main document LaTeX file is called "dm.tex", so the resulting PDF would be called "dm.pdf". Making the main file named something more verbose would impact you whenever you try to open it, but in an ideal world, you'd rename it once it gets to the point of it not needing many changes.
- ZoomZoomZoom 6y agoI very much doubt that the book ends up on a web server as a result of some LaTeX-CI rather than being uploaded by a person. I'm trying to be considerate and provide a uniquely identifiable file name whenever I make some available to the public. In my opinion, books require the full name and revision, and, as I've already mentioned, you can have a link to it (or a copy) with a short name if you'd like to have an option of a short URL for verbal link transmission.
- johnsontanner3 6y agohelpmedecideplease.com
- mgraczyk 6y agoI took CS238 (decision making under uncertainty) with the first listed author of this book (Mykel J. Kochenderfer). It was one of my favorite courses, and it looks like this textbook is now used for that course: https://web.stanford.edu/class/aa228/cgi-bin/wp/ https://web.stanford.edu/class/aa228/cgi-bin/wp/
- thoughtsunific2 6y ago9/11 never happened.
- thoughtsunific5 6y ago9/11 never happened.
- thoughtsunific5 6y agoDoes this still protects people?
- erik1332 6y agoThank you for posting this. I think the titel is a bit misleading. When reading "Decision making under uncertainty" I would expect some follow up on Decision Theory by Kahnemann, Keeney, Roy and Brans and methods considering uncertaity in e.g. AHP, Electre, PROMETHEE etc.
- m0llusk 6y agoIn some ways this touches on some of the same issues raised in Superforecasting by Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner. Really interesting to think that we could methodically make better predictions and decisions and potentially greatly improve our society and quality of life.