[ih] History of AI and Internet

[Greg Skinner]

On Jun 23, 2026, at 9:52 AM, Barbara Denny via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> As to books i would suggest reading the second edition of Richard Sutton's and Andrew Barto's book "Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction". They won the Turing award for the work last year.  I understand the book is very readable (no heavy math) but i haven't gotten around to reading my copy yet.
> By chance i also discovered a neuroscientist had done his thesis on this topic if you want to see what he did.
> "https://www.researchgate.net/publication/304048183_Human_Reinforcement_Learning_Insights_from_intracranial_recordings_and_stimulation" 
> 
> barbara
> 

I found a copy of Sutton and Barto’s text online. [1] (It is noted as a work in progress.) Just skimming through the book, it draws quite a bit on dynamic programming (DP).  That might be challenging for those who don’t use DP regularly or haven’t yet learned it.

I also noticed that Martha Steenstrup reviewed the text and provided feedback to the authors.  For those not familiar with her, she made key contributions to policy-based routing and mobile ad-hoc networking.

--gregbo

[1] https://web.stanford.edu/class/psych209/Readings/SuttonBartoIPRLBook2ndEd.pdf