Foundational readings

The ideas of modern AI that you read, not code: Sutton, Aaronson, Legg

In this chapter, you will learn to

• Read and discuss founding texts of modern AI
• Connect these ideas to what you have practised

3 exercises

Each exercise is graded automatically, in your browser. The full statements are available once you have an account.

1. The bitter lesson

   In 2019, Rich Sutton, one of the fathers of reinforcement learning, published a two-page text that became a classic: The Bitter Lesson. Read it (5 minutes): [The Bitter Lesson, Rich…

2. The rise and fall of complexity

   The entropy of a closed system only ever increases (the second law of thermodynamics). Yet if you film milk being poured into coffee, the most structured image, the one with the swirls, is neither at the start (two…

3. Measuring an intelligence

   "Is this agent intelligent?" How can we answer without limiting ourselves to a handful of tests chosen by humans? In 2008, in his doctoral thesis Machine Super Intelligence, Shane Legg (a future co-founder of…