Tom M Mitchell

“Machine Learning is a textbook and I would call it the textbook for machine learning and artificial intelligence. Machine learning is just the math of teaching a machine how to solve a problem on its own, because you’re not going to be able to be there to solve it for the machine. It can be any kind of problem: it could be a robot that needs to figure out how to get from point A to point B or it could be a supply inventory algorithm for trying to figure out how many products it should order for Walmart. What’s great about this book is that, first of all, it’s not intimidating. It’s really slim and it covers the full range of artificial intelligence algorithms for really solving any problem. You can think of it this way – if you’re a wrestler facing a problem, this has every wrestling move that you’re going to need, in order to knock out any problem that you see. And that is really, really empowering. Because after you read a book like this, you look at any problem that is out there, and you think to yourself, ‘Oh I can build a machine that can figure this out better than a human, with better accuracy, and more quickly.’ They say that once you have a hammer everything begins to look like a nail. That’s absolutely true, and Machine Learning is one hell of a hammer.” Read more...

The best books on Robotics

Daniel H Wilson, Scientist