[HN Gopher] Algorithms for Decision Making
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Algorithms for Decision Making
Author : Dowwie
Score : 392 points
Date : 2021-01-10 16:53 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (algorithmsbook.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (algorithmsbook.com)
| jturpin wrote:
| Does anyone have any advice on how to make the most out of books
| like these? I'm trying to read more textbooks in subjects that I
| really phoned in during college this year. My current strategy is
| to make some note cards and take notes (which is kind of
| tedious), wondering if anyone has any advice as to their own
| workflows.
| late2part wrote:
| I typically take a book like this and read it. Then I think
| about it. I also think about it as I read it. I ask my friends
| in person and online if they've read and talk with them about
| it. Sometimes I'll look for online forums which discuss the
| book. This is how I make the most out of books like these.
| abnry wrote:
| My suggestions, not for this book in particular but technical
| textbooks in general:
|
| - Get very familiar with the table of contents first. Then note
| and filter out the sections you are less interested in or don't
| appear to provide the biggest bang for your buck.
|
| - Annotate, annotate, annotate. Active reading is better than
| passive reading. I use a 2-in-1 chromebook and a passive pen to
| highlight in the adobe pdf reader.
|
| - Write detailed notes in addition to annotating (i.e. in a
| separate notebook or markdown file). Cull/convert your notes
| into Anki/Memrise digital flashcards. Drill on your phone when
| you are lying in bed.
| sgt101 wrote:
| Get in a group. Work is a good place to do this. Pick out some
| books, send a mail round saying that you are running a tech
| book group. Get folks together and read a chapter a week (this
| is hard in reality - be cool with everyone and sometimes let
| chapters slip over a few weeks). Every week someone leads the
| discussion. Every week someone volunteers to do the next weeks.
| You meet for an hour to discuss.
| jldugger wrote:
| The way I did this with a stats book was: 1.
| Ten pages a day 2. Do all the exercises, and redo all the
| ones you get wrong. 3. Add anki cards for all the key
| terms, ideas, formulas, etc. The best textbooks include a
| summary the end of every chapter that you can double check your
| notes / anki against. Prefer cloze markup to question / answer
| cards -- more cards per "fact" but longer retention. 4.
| Double check your cards against a source like Wikipedia for
| completeness / accuracy, since sometimes there's an author bias
| to content with.
|
| This takes about an hour a day for #1 and #2, and an hour a
| week for #3/4 plus a few minutes a day extra in the Anki review
| queue. For this book, you're looking at about 2 months start to
| finish.
| Dzugaru wrote:
| As a programmer I usually try to implement some of the
| algorithms in language of my choice and throw them at some toy
| problems (it's good there is no shortage of interesting toy
| problems in this field). It was really fun with Artificial
| Intelligence: Modern Approach book (ex: implementing a SAT
| solver from scratch and solving Minesweeper by pure logic is
| very satisfying).
| nefitty wrote:
| Anki is basically the most efficient method to study facts. I
| use a gamified version called Memrise.
| currymj wrote:
| it's hard for me to learn something if i don't have something I
| need to do with the knowledge. it's not that I can't sit down
| and do it, but things won't stick in my brain.
|
| so I would say, try to find something you want to do that
| requires the information in the textbook. or else just don't
| bother reading the textbook and go do something else you
| actually want to do.
| taqd wrote:
| I enjoy typing, so I like to simply type out the entire
| textbook. It's a bit ridiculous to some, but it slows down the
| pace that I actually learn and engage with the content. A
| textbook usually takes me a couple months to type, and I'm
| never in a rush though finishing chapters is satisfying and an
| easy goal for an evening. I find it similar to as if I were to
| attend a lecture on the topic.
| nullsense wrote:
| David Goggins makes the claim that due to his learning
| disabilities he acquired the diving instruction manual 18
| months ahead of time and wrote it out by hand 10 times in
| order to learn the material.
|
| Thought that was really interesting.
| kylewins wrote:
| Seems like a really bad way to learn.
|
| But gotta love goggins, dude likes taking the hardest path
| to success.
| mud_dauber wrote:
| This looks awesome. Thank you!
| currymj wrote:
| this book describes the linear programming formulation for
| finding the optimal value function. cool to see, I think this
| formulation is underrated by the CS community compared to other
| communities also trying to solve MDPs.
|
| however I wish it also described the dual of this linear program.
| this problem involves optimizing over state-action frequencies
| which is equivalent to optimizing over policies.
|
| so value functions and policies are dual to each other. that's
| pretty neat! not sure why modern RL texts don't talk about it at
| all.
| Gravyness wrote:
| How is something so useful so available? Is it the karma from
| past year?
| [deleted]
| sncsy wrote:
| Any way to get an epub version so I can load on Kindle with
| navigable chapters?
| Zerith wrote:
| Would love to have a kindle version.
| huitzitziltzin wrote:
| The first author (MK) also wrote "Algorithms for Optimization"
| (MIT Press), which is also implemented in (and is a nice guide
| to) the Julia language, which is itself a pretty sweet language.
| cashsterling wrote:
| I highly recommend this book. I am 100% going to buy their next
| book too.
|
| Julia is an awesome language and the ecosystem around it is
| getting better quickly.
| Mageek wrote:
| *first two authors (MK and TW) wrote Alg4Opt This new book is
| in the same format.
| mkaic wrote:
| Mykel Kochenderfer is my uncle! He does some really cool research
| up at Stanford. Lots of autonomous quadcopter drones doing
| automatic maneuvers and learning how to not crash into each
| other. It's cool to get to see his work on HN!
| E-Reverance wrote:
| Since you had an Ask HN regarding machine learning resources,
| and your uncle has written some machine learning papers, have
| you considered asking him to teach you or is he really busy?
| mkaic wrote:
| I have talked to him about it, actually! He gave me some
| great course recommendations that I plan on looking into. Ask
| HN was mostly motivated by wanting to get multiple data
| points/opinions.
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| Lets say I wanted to verify a student read a page of text from a
| novel. And I wanted to automatically generate a question from
| that text. Any algorithms that can currently do that?
| FabHK wrote:
| The title reminded me of this anecdote (which I can't locate now,
| might have been somewhere in Kahneman's or Ariely's recent
| oeuvre):
|
| This associate professor of Decision Theory received two offers
| of tenure track positions at reputable universities, and got some
| friends and colleagues together to discuss which one to take. One
| of them suggested he use the tools of his discipline, Decision
| Theory, to help him make a decision. To which the professor
| replies: "Now, come on guys, this is serious..."
| Pamar wrote:
| I link at the source of this anecdote at the end of my essay on
| I-Ching: https://www.pa-mar.net/Lifestyle/I-Ching.html
|
| Here is the direct link if you don't care about my stuff (it
| has been featured on HN already)
|
| http://statweb.stanford.edu/~cgates/PERSI/papers/thinking.pd...
| isoprophlex wrote:
| Incredible depth and clarity!
|
| Authors, if you're reading this, thanks a thousand for making
| this available to us!
| aiprof wrote:
| Sure thing! We wanted to get feedback from the broad community
| so that we can make it as awesome as possible before it goes to
| print. ;-)
| ZoomZoomZoom wrote:
| It's a minor nitpick, but anyway, what's up with naming your pdf
| files like this 'dm.pdf'? What's wrong with
| 'Algorithms_for_Decision_Making.pdf' of even adding the
| 'Mykel_Kochenderfer,Tim_Wheeler,Kyle_Wray_-_' prefix? I can't put
| a proper name in a "save" dialog until I open the book, and I
| need to save it first!
|
| I sound so annoyed because I recently downloaded 'hist.pdf',
| 'fxtbook.pdf' and 'V090212S.pdf' Is it just to get a memorable
| file URL? If so, humanity invented simlinks long ago.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| This looks neat, but anyone interested should know there's also a
| whole mature field to solve similar problems. The field of
| control theory has some really simple and really robust methods
| for getting a system from state A to state B. If you aren't
| trying to learn how the system works simultaneous to your
| algorithm being deployed, it can be a really a good fit.
|
| This book and control theory solve different problems. I'm just
| commenting because I sometimes see modern ML folks trying to
| apply super duper general techniques to problems that are easily
| solved specifically with simple undergrad-level techniques from
| the specific fields (including this material to control
| problems). Also, I just think control theory is really cool and
| perhaps under-discussed in "cool math/eng stuff" circles.
| aiprof wrote:
| You are right that sometimes people use much more sophisticated
| algorithms than are really required to solve a problem. My
| experience is that the simplest approach is often the best one
| in the long term. There are actually deep connections between
| problems in control theory and the topics in this book (e.g.,
| LQR control), though these different communities often use
| different notation. The focus of the book is more on higher-
| level decision making, but the execution of the decisions---
| such as motor commands to an actuator---are often best done
| through PID or some other method that can be found in a control
| theory textbook.
| dimatura wrote:
| After the basic PID controller, what would you consider the
| most useful tools for control?
| tshaddox wrote:
| I know virtually nothing about control theory, but when I was
| into RC quadcopters back around 2011 I know Kalman filters
| got name dropped a lot.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalman_filter
| [deleted]
| eli_gottlieb wrote:
| Control theory is indeed, quite cool, and under-discussed in
| most circles.
|
| Also, unfortunately, classical control theory is primarily good
| for linear time-invariant dynamics in the frequency space of
| the Laplace transform. If you can't locally linearize your
| model and/or need to learn a model, classical control
| approaches are underdeveloped, and everyone has switched to
| optimal control and RL.
| ajfriend wrote:
| Can you recommend any good books or other resources?
| jamessb wrote:
| Ben Recht [0] has worked on control theory and reinforcement
| learning.
|
| See his blog post "What we've Learned to control" [1] and the
| survey paper "A Tour of Reinforcement Learning: The View from
| Continuous Control" [2] may be of interest.
|
| [0]: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~brecht/
|
| [1]: https://www.argmin.net/2020/06/29/tour-revisited/
|
| [2]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.09460
| mikesabbagh wrote:
| I dont know about you, but I have been trying to cover this topic
| for some time, but it is very difficult to assimilate. Like many,
| i am a self learned developer, I do have higher education in
| sciences and the math is tough to me but I can understand what
| they are talking about. Still those algorithms are challenging
| massinstall wrote:
| At first sight an amazing book, thank you!
| goldenManatee wrote:
| Thank you. I've been hoping for a book like this for a while.
| johnsontanner3 wrote:
| helpmedecideplease.com
| bhattisatish wrote:
| Julia Notebooks containing the source code from the book is
| available at https://github.com/sisl/algforopt-notebooks
| T-A wrote:
| Looks like a different book, "Algorithms for Optimization", by
| two of the three authors of "Algorithms for Decision Making".
| joubert wrote:
| I can also recommend "Algorithms to Live By", by Brian Christian
| & Tom Griffiths. https://www.amazon.com/Algorithms-Live-Computer-
| Science-Deci...
|
| Super accessible.
| aiprof wrote:
| I recommend that one to my students. I also recommend Brian's
| new book titled "The Alignment Problem" and it is cited in the
| book.
| alexpetralia wrote:
| Such a good book. I learned so much about life from the multi-
| armed bandit problem.
| OkGoDoIt wrote:
| Yeah, that was a really great book. Also has a well-produced
| narration available on Audible that I listened to. I recommend
| it.
| dundercoder wrote:
| I love this book. Listened to it 4-5 times. Lots of really
| practical application
| jacobrussell wrote:
| I still think about this book every time I get on Zillow. Great
| chapter on buying a home.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Yes! ATLB is fantastic!
| ab-dm wrote:
| Reading this at the moment! Fantastic book and easy to read
| 13415 wrote:
| Is a print version of this book available or planned for the near
| future?
| Mageek wrote:
| A print version is planned with MIT Press for release in the
| fall! PDF will continue to be available for free forever.
| 13415 wrote:
| Thanks a lot! That's great. With a book like that I prefer a
| printed version.
| mikaeluman wrote:
| Looks very good. Can't believe we can just download the entire
| pdf free of charge. So helpful !
| Mageek wrote:
| The authors plan to have the book be free, online, forever!
| de6u99er wrote:
| I hope you have considered racial bias.
|
| e.g.: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03228-6
|
| or:
| https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/07/17/1005396/predicti...
|
| or: https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/can-racist-
| algorithm...
| aiprof wrote:
| This is a very important dimension. See Sec. 1.5 of the book.
| There is also a side reference to a book that discusses this
| and other societal implications.
| nmca wrote:
| This looks very good from my skim! It includes state-of-the-art
| approaches like Actor-Critic with MCTS and loads of recent and
| interesting things like GAIL and SMILE. The areas where I have
| expertise superficially seem like good treatments. I'll have to
| see what other RLers think and perhaps use it to study up on
| belief states :)
|
| Much more up-to-date than sutton and barto, but the authors are
| rather less well known.
| sudobanban wrote:
| Such great resource! Huge props to the authors for making this
| freely available.
| Trex_Egg wrote:
| Thank you for this book
| gumby wrote:
| Anyone who likes this would enjoy George Polya's short book. "How
| to Solve it" which these days is widely available as a pdf.
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(page generated 2021-01-10 23:00 UTC)