Challenging problems both attract and repel us. They frustrate us, accelerate our pulses, cause ulcers, and perhaps even curtail our lifespans. On the other hand, the knotty problems of life offer us food for thought, sustaining our creativity, and adding emotional spice to the human experience. We encounter difficult tasks day in and day out. The solutions to these problems must be sought with resourcefulness and creativity, for until now we have had little insight into the nature of these tasks, and even less into methods for resolving them. This unique book explores the nature of...

Intelligent systems of the natural kind are adaptive and robust: they learn over time and degrade gracefully under stress. If artificial systems are to display a similar level of sophistication, an organizing framework and operating principles are required to manage the resulting complexity of design and behavior.
This book presents a general framework for adaptive systems. The utility of the comprehensive framework is demonstrated by tailoring it to particular models of computational learning, ranging from neural networks to declarative logic.
The key to robustness lies in...

Wildcat groups such as hedge funds have played a growing role in causing or aggravating blowups in the capital markets as well as the banking system. One crackup was the crisis of 2008, which ended up crippling the financial system and the real economy. The bombshell obliterated trillions of dollars from each of the major stock markets of the world, destroyed millions of jobs in sizable countries, and nixed trillions of dollars by way of lost output in the global economy. This guidebook exposes the reality behind the illusion of profits in the hedge fund game. In plain language, the primer...