[ih] History of AI and Internet

[Greg Skinner]

On Jun 25, 2026, at 3:27 PM, Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Greg,
> 
> In my opinion, [Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction] 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
> 

I read the preface for Ananthaswamy’s Why Machines Learn (using a Kindle sample available at Amazon) and found the math more accessible.

When I first skimmed through Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction and saw the many mentions of dynamic programming and the references to people such as Bertsekas, I immediately thought of MIT’s Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems <https://lids.mit.edu/> and its contributions to networking.  They are very much involved in AI now, including reinforcement learning.

--gregbo