
Intractable Problems in Control Theory (1986) [pdf] - pizza
http://www.mit.edu/~jnt/Papers/J012-86-intractable.pdf
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mark_element
Very surprised to see this on HN front page.

Control theory is a fabulous subject and has nice relationships to
computational theory because classical (and more modern [s/d/o/nl/MPC] control
theory) are obsessed with optimality, reachability and provable optimality and
stability. In practice most control systems in the world are not designed nor
run under the assumptions necessary to have an optimal controller. This is a
field with a tremendous gap between theory and practice.

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opportune
I think given the hype and (hopefully) coming importance of automated
cars/automation in general in our daily lives, control theory is going to
become increasingly popular over time. Maybe kids 50 years from now will have
it as a mandatory course in their CS program.

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kobeya
Control theory is already ubiquitous.

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controlthis
It's incredibly sad that control theorists spent so much time working out
analytic solutions to dynamical systems, only to be so thoroughly beaten by
Reinforcement Learning.

The recent successes of Alpha Go, Alpha Go Zero, as well work at OpenAI and
Berkeley (especially on the incredibly physically-accurate simulator MuJuCo)
show that the era of classical controls is dead. Indeed, it may be the case
that seeking analytic solutions to problems like this is an artifact of a time
when computation was expensive and human time was cheap.

In fact, recent work on robots learning to play with themselves from OpenAI
[[https://blog.openai.com/competitive-self-
play/](https://blog.openai.com/competitive-self-play/)] suggests that in the
near future, humans won't be needed for designing these algorithms at all!

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pizza
well uh.. I mean.. I beg to differ. I guess my opinion is "if what we call
machine learning is really an old dream, then what was called control theory
(and still is called control theory) was actually the grand _child_ of the
idea of machine learning itself -- and that present-day machine learning is
maybe only becoming real 100 or so years after when it was first dreamable,
and actually _dreamed_ of"

That said, there are many problems that troubled the earliest philosophers
that still trouble the latest philosophers.. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ .. but computers do
pose themselves as a fundamentally-new tool.

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laichzeit0
I really prefer the term Statistical Learning. It’s more accurate. I know,
Computer Science guys hate it because it takes away a lot of the mystery and
hand waving, but it more accurately describes what’s going on.

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avmich
Is it an accurate description of neural net training?

