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A compelling argument for including the human perspective within science, and for how human experience makes science possible. 'This is by far the best book I've read this year.' Michael Pollan, Professor of the Practice of Non-fiction, Harvard University; #1 New York Times bestselling author. It s tempting to think that science gives us a God s-eye view of reality. But we neglect the place of human experience at our peril. In The Blind Spot, astrophysicist Adam Frank, theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser, and philosopher Evan Thompson call for a revolutionary scientific worldview, where science includes rather than ignores or tries not to see humanity s lived experience as an inescapable part of our search for objective truth. The authors present science not as discovering an absolute reality but rather as a highly refined, constantly evolving form of human experience. They urge practitioners to reframe how science works for the sake of our future in the face of the planetary climate crisis and increasing science denialism. Since the dawn of the Enlightenment, humanity has looked to science to tell us who we are, where we come from, and where we re going, but we ve gotten stuck thinking we can know the universe from outside our position in it. When we try to understand reality only through external physical things imagined from this outside position, we lose sight of the necessity of experience. This is the Blind Spot, which the authors show lies behind our scientific conundrums about time and the origin of the universe, quantum physics, life, AI and the mind, consciousness, and Earth as a planetary system. The authors propose an alternative vision: scientific knowledge is a self-correcting narrative made from the world and our experience of it evolving together. To finally 'see' the Blind Spot is to awaken from a delusion of absolute knowledge and to see how reality and experience intertwine. The Blind Spot goes where no science book goes, urging us to create a new scientific culture that views ourselves both as an expression of nature and as a source of nature s self-understanding, so that humanity can flourish in the new millennium.

The significantly expanded and updated new edition of a widely used text on reinforcement learning, one of the most active research areas in artificial intelligence.Reinforcement learning, one of the most active research areas in artificial intelligence, is a computational approach to learning whereby an agent tries to maximize the total amount of reward it receives while interacting with a complex, uncertain environment. In Reinforcement Learning, Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto provide a clear and simple account of the field's key ideas and algorithms. This second edition has been significantly expanded and updated, presenting new topics and updating coverage of other topics.Like the first edition, this second edition focuses on core, online learning algorithms, with the more mathematical material set off in shaded boxes. Part I covers as much of reinforcement learning as possible without going beyond the tabular case for which exact solutions can be found. Many algorithms presented in this part are new for the second edition, including UCB, Expected Sarsa, and Double Learning. Part II extends these ideas to function approximation, with new sections on such topics as artificial neural networks and the Fourier basis, and offers expanded treatment of off-policy learning and policy-gradient methods. Part III has new chapters on reinforcement learning's relationships to psychology and neuroscience, as well as an updated case-studies chapter including AlphaGo and AlphaGo Zero, Atari game playing, and IBM Watson's wagering strategy. The final chapter discusses the future societal impacts of reinforcement learning.

What it means to design at a time when, for many people, the future seems to have become an impossibility. When reality fails us, what can design do? Question design s relationship to reality, as Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby do, in this exhilarating, yet thoughtful journey to the edges of science, philosophy, and literature to find new ways of thinking about the possible and about the meaning, function, and place of design in that speculative world of 'not here, not now.' A conceptual travelogue of sorts, Not Here, Not Now brings together words, images, and objects that capture, in design form, some of the ideas encountered along the way. Itself a design experiment, the book explores ways to bring these ideas into conversation with objects through imagined archives, libraries, glossaries, taxonomies, lists, tales, and essays. The design responses in Not Here, Not Now to a stone raft, e.g., or a vegetable lamb, swatches of imaginary colors, a pocket universe in the home, objects undergoing space-time collapse are, like the most compelling utopias, impossible by design, aiming instead to nourish the creative, intellectual, and imaginative ground from which new possibilities, still unknown, might begin to emerge.