[ih] History of AI and Internet

[Greg Skinner]

On Jun 24, 2026, at 11:45 AM, Barbara Denny via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> Just to be clear, the second edition was published (2018).  I don't know about the draft you read online.  I got my copy on amazon. Too bad all the tech bookstores i knew about in the Bay Area closed along time  ago.
> barbara
>    

I found updated copies (copyright 2018, 2020) of the book on Richard Sutton’s website <http://www.incompleteideas.net/>. The authors made a comment about the rigor of the second edition in the Preface:

"As in the first edition, we chose not to produce a rigorous formal treatment of
reinforcement learning, or to formulate it in the most general terms. However, our deeper
understanding of some topics since the first edition required a bit more mathematics
to explain; we have set off the more mathematical parts in shaded boxes that the non-
mathematically-inclined may choose to skip."

Since some of you are or were professors, I’d be interested in your opinions about the required math background, as the book is designed for a course in reinforcement learning.

--gregbo