Third Editions

Two excellent, influential computer science textbooks are published in third edition later this year.

• Artificial Intelligence, by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig. I think there is still time to enter the cover design contest. According to Amazon.com, the book will be published in October.

  The long-anticipated revision of this #1 selling book offers the most comprehensive, state of the art introduction to the theory and practice of artificial intelligence for modern applications. Intelligent Agents. Solving Problems by Searching. Informed Search Methods. Game Playing. Agents that Reason Logically. First-order Logic. Building a Knowledge Base. Inference in First-Order Logic. Logical Reasoning Systems. Practical Planning. Planning and Acting. Uncertainty. Probabilistic Reasoning Systems. Making Simple Decisions. Making Complex Decisions. Learning from Observations. Learning with Neural Networks. Reinforcement Learning. Knowledge in Learning. Agents that Communicate. Practical Communication in English. Perception. Robotics. For computer professionals, linguists, and cognitive scientists interested in artificial intelligence.

  (Amazon.com)

• Introduction to Algorithms, by Thomas H. Cormen, Charles E. Leiserson, Ronald L. Rivest and Clifford Stein. According to the publisher, this book will be published in September.

  The third edition has been revised and updated throughout. It includes two completely new chapters, on van Emde Boas trees and multithreaded algorithms, and substantial additions to the chapter on recurrence (now called “Divide-and-Conquer”). It features improved treatment of dynamic programming and greedy algorithms and a new notion of edge-based flow in the material on flow networks. Many new exercises and problems have been added for this edition.

  (MIT Press)

Book: Introducing Artificial Intelligence

The book Introducing Artificial Intelligence by Henry Brighton and Howard Selina is a very accessible introduction to the history and some key concepts of Artificial Intelligence.

Here are some of the topics covered:

• Strong AI vs Weak AI
• Psychology, Philosophy and Cognition
• Computation and Turing Machines
• Intelligence, Thought and the Chinese Room argument
• Ontology and the Cyc project
• Neural Networks, Machine Learning, Robotics

This is a small book and clearly the emphasis is introductory breadth and not depth. Like other books in the series, this one his very short and features illustrations on every page, accompanied by very short passages on text. The conversational style makes it well suitable for interested laypeople.

Book: Mindset

A while ago I came across The Effort Effect in which Guy Kawasaki talks about Carol Dweck‘s article by the same title and mentions her book Mindset.

I purchased the book soon after it became available and managed to finally read it this past week. It is easily the book which has had the most impact on me of all the books I have read this year. I have been intrigued by the concepts of being in the zone, cultivating flow, being in the moment, being goal oriented and embracing the process in between. Cultivating practice for the sake of practice. Mindfulness. Concepts really that have impact in all kinds of areas of life, ranging from personal relationships to athletic performance, hobbies and career.

I have also been puzzling over why some people would resist change. Sure, change can be hard. But why the resistance. What if they knew they needed to change? What, if they know what they needed to change, too?

This book has a lot of answers as well as explaining the above concepts in convincing terms. It basically comes down to mindsets. Fixed mindsets and growth mindsets.

Reading this book, I repeatedly found myself thinking back to times in the past and I would find explanations to behaviors that either led me to success or led me to shy away from challenges. I am still digesting.

Stuck in a fixed mindset, failure is to be avoided at all cost. This means that effort is often avoided as well. “If we need to try so hard, we’re probably not smart/talented/capable/etc. enough.”

In a growth mindset, effort is A Good Thing. “If we don’t have to try, then we probably don’t learn either.” Hard problems become welcome challenges and not simply opportunities for failure.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

Book: The 4-Hour Workweek

I recently read The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss.

The author was able to build up considerable buzz before the book’s release via his blog as well as other public appearances. There is a podcast of his presentation at SXSW available online.

The book is about the author’s lessons in life style design and include some of the following concepts:

• Elimination of unneeded activities
• Applying of the 80/20 rule to increase productivity/profits.
• Usage of virtual assistants to outsource various activities
• Working remotely
• Taking advantage of currency differences
• etc.

There are a lot of interesting, useful ideas here. Not all of them are for everyone of course and not all occupations are very well suited here. How are you going to convince your supervisor that you can work at home, if your presence in the office/lab/etc. is required? Knowledge workers though might probably have the easier time with many of Tim Ferriss’ ideas.

I believe that books of this type (self-help/business/motivation/etc.) typically do not need to offer more than one or two really useful pieces of information to make them a valuable investment. In this particular case, the bits on his Low Information Diet make the entire book worthwhile for me. Tim is the enemy of wilfing.

It also sounds like he hates the very idea of dealing with interruptions to productivity and he ensures that this is clear: Being busy does not mean being productive. And being productive does not necessarily mean having to work eight hours a day. Having the liberties of a millionaire does not require being a millionaire and What Do You Do? does not necessarily ask for your job description.

He calls for counter-intuitive approaches as well as aiming for unrealistic goals. Unrealistic? Well, yes, the competition for the more doable ones is fierce!

In all seriousness though, I recommend this book. He has done a lot of outside-the-box thinking and it clearly must be working for him and I believe it can for others. If nothing else people will be able to gain a different perspective on modern life and work.