

Clever Algorithms: Nature-Inspired Programming Recipes - petercooper
http://www.cleveralgorithms.com/

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mahmud
The author is this Australian academic:

<http://www.ict.swin.edu.au/personal/jbrownlee/>

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jasonb05
I am no longer an academic. I had a go at the startup thing and am now a PhD
surviving in industry :)

The book has been released (today!) as a paperback, free PDF and free online.
You may also fork the content on github if your keen:
<https://github.com/jbrownlee/CleverAlgorithms>

I'm happy to answer any questions.

Some guff from the back cover of the book:

Implementing an Artificial Intelligence algorithm is difficult. Algorithm
descriptions may be incomplete, inconsistent, and distributed across a number
of papers, chapters and even websites. This can result in varied
interpretations of algorithms, undue attrition of algorithms, and ultimately
bad science.

This book is an effort to address these issues by providing a handbook of
algorithmic recipes drawn from the fields of Metaheuristics, Biologically
Inspired Computation and Computational Intelligence, described in a complete,
consistent, and centralized manner. These standardized descriptions were
carefully designed to be accessible, usable, and understandable. Most of the
algorithms described were originally inspired by biological and natural
systems, such as the adaptive capabilities of genetic evolution and the
acquired immune system, and the foraging behaviors of birds, bees, ants and
bacteria. An encyclopedic algorithm reference, this book is intended for
research scientists, engineers, students, and interested amateurs.

Each algorithm description provides a working code example in the Ruby
Programming Language. Source code and additional resources can be downloaded
from the books companion website online at <http://www.CleverAlgorithms.com>

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merijnv
As a (poor!) Computer Science student I want to give you much props for making
a free version available. Just skimmed through a bit and the text seems very
readable (good citations too). Hopefully this will finally help me close the
gap between knowing the theory behind some AI techniques (especially neural
networks) and actually implementing them. I'm certainly adding this to my list
of books to get soon-ish.

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jasonb05
Great, I hope you find it useful!

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foenix
Wow. This is a must read for future cognitive science scholars. I think I'm
going to order this as a graduation present to myself.

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joshrule
A related paper just came out in Science a few days ago. The authors used the
inner workings of a fruit fly's brain to provide a robust solution to the
Maximal Independent Set (MIS) problem.

Check it out here: <http://barkai-serv.weizmann.ac.il/GroupPage/>
<http://www.sciencemag.org/content/331/6014/183.abstract>

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rst
Looks useful. If you like this, you might also like a look at learning
algorithms which are less nature-inspired, but still effective --- Support
Vector Machines, for instance.

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jasonb05
Agreed. I'm strongly considering working on a second volume on machine
learning algorithms.

I chose nature inspired for this book because that was the general area of my
graduate research.

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_exec
Just bought a copy..thank you for making it available as a freely downloadable
PDF :)

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jasonb05
Cheers, I hope you enjoy it. Happy to answer any questions, just shoot me an
email any time on jasonb _AT_ cleveralgorithms.com

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rbxbx
Curious as to what kind of profit you're getting seeing as this is through
Lulu... would like to support your efforts, is purchasing through Lulu the
ideal way?

(Also curious as to the quality of their prints, I've heard in the past that
code samples can be fuzzy, but I suppose that would be on a per book basis,
and have not directly observed this myself)

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jasonb05
Spreading the word is probably the best way to support the project, thanks for
asking. Buying a paperback results in a few bucks royalty for me - which is
nice - but will never pay for my time on this (not the point anyway).

I have two proof copies sitting here on my desk - the code does not look fuzzy
to me, but as you allude, LuLu subcontracts to local printers and paperbacks
may vary by region.

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cuttinedg
I work as a developer at Lulu. I had forwarded this to my colleagues and asked
around and the general consensus is that code should not be look fuzzy. If the
source image is fuzzy (say a screen shot of code vs fixed width font) then it
would end up being fuzzy in print.

You book has been marked as a staff-pick now. Hoping that this will help in
spreading the word.

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jasonb05
great to hear, thanks a lot!

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wladimir
It was a long time ago I that was really excited by a computer science book
but this is exactly the kind of data analysis/optimization/machine learning
stuff that interests me. I'm definitely going to buy a copy.

The text looks very readable. The code examples are in Ruby, which I don't
really know, but that's probably no problem as it's supposed to be similar to
Python.

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thalur
Have you considered selling it on the Kindle/iBooks/B&N etc?

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jasonb05
I am organizing a distribution package. I believe it could take up to 4-6
weeks (sorry).

