[ih] History of AI and Internet

[Brian E Carpenter]

Greg,

> 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.

In my opinion, the book is a masterpiece, but it needs fluency in differential calculus and matrix algebra (which I lost many years ago). I think it would be quite hard to read cover-to-cover while skipping the maths. Also, if you're interested in applicability to large language models, it won't help you. A lot has happened since 2020.

Ananthaswamy's book that I mentioned recently relies on similar maths, but you can largely skip it without losing the thread.

Regards/Ngā mihi
    Brian Carpenter

On 25-Jun-26 19:33, Greg Skinner via Internet-history wrote:
> 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
>