

Artificial Intelligence for Humans Vol 1: Fundamental Algorithms - danboarder
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jeffheaton/artificial-intelligence-for-humans-vol-1-fund-algo

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circuiter
Looks pretty good. But I'm afraid someone complaining about the mathematical
foundations of AI is like an aspiring surgeon complaining about how much
anatomy s/he has to study.

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netcan
If surgery didn't involve risk to patients, you could probably teach quite a
lot of surgery to almost anyone. They might not be as able to improvise in
rare scenarios, but the could probably remove appendixes pretty successfully.

Some knowledge is inherently linear. Hard to teach multiplication to someone
that can't add. Some aren't and a lot are grey areas where prior knowledge
isn't absolutely necessary, but it's a big advantage. For example you can
teach a lot of statistics without teaching the way things are calculated, but
doing the sums with pen and paper will give you a better understanding. A
confidence interval has a meaning that can be explained using words to someone
without the mathematical skills to be able to calculate it. So is a
statistical distribution.

Is it better to know who to calculate the probability distribution with a pen
and paper? Yes and in some interesting cases, it's very important. That
doesn't mean that a lot of useful statistics can't be taught to people who
will take shortcuts using software.

Knowledge keeps growing like a tree with thickening branches and sprouting
branches of their own. We can't tell new people where the last generation
started. In the world of increasingly specialized knowledge and the culture of
lifelong learning that I hope is evolving, its important to find ways of
dropping people into the middle of fields. AI for not mathematicians seems
doable.

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jdale27
I thought AIMA was pretty gentle on the math. It also doesn't assume, as this
text does, that AI == machine learning (even if that is a more and more
popular assumption these days).

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dschiptsov
Humans who cannot read AIMA should consider do shopping.)

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dominotw
what shopping?

