This book is about beliefs---how we get them and how we evaluate them. It takes the form of a fictional conversation makes the following points: 1) in analogy with robots, we humans know by the models we make of reality, 2) these models are always provisional and sometimes unreliable, 3) it is especially important to examine thoroughly those models upon which we base actions, and 4) the scientific method provides an excellent guide for such examination. The level of exposition is neither technical nor deeply philosophical
I enjoy writing and in addition to my published books I offer free Open Content material on this web page. I both enjoy and appreciate feedback on ideas for material and reporting any errors. I offer free web books on Java and artificial intelligence programming, Common Lisp programming, and a new but still incomplete book The Software Design and Development Book. I am also working on a Ruby AI book and a short paper on AI design patterns. I also have a link to an old paper on AI, Go and Consciousness (updated 1/25/2004) available here. I have a short paper Jumpstarting the Semantic Web available here (new version 1/14/2005). I am also starting to include my fiction (short stories) here in addition to computer science web books.
This introductory textbook on reinforcement learning is targeted toward engineers and scientists in artificial intelligence, operations research, neural networks, and control systems, and we hope it will also be of interest to psychologists and neuroscien