Personal motivation. The dream of creating artificial devices that reach or outperform human inteUigence is an old one. It is also one of the dreams of my youth, which have never left me. What makes this challenge so interesting? A solution would have enormous implications on our society, and there are reasons to believe that the AI problem can be solved in my expected lifetime. So, it's worth sticking to it for a lifetime, even if it takes 30 years or so to reap the benefits. The AI problem. The science of artificial intelligence (AI) may be defined as the construction of intelligent systems...

This volume contains the papers presented at the 21st International Conf- ence on Algorithmic Learning Theory (ALT 2010), which was held in Canberra, Australia, October 6-8, 2010. The conference was co-located with the 13th - ternational Conference on Discovery Science (DS 2010) and with the Machine Learning Summer School, which was held just before ALT 2010. The tech- cal program of ALT 2010, contained 26 papers selected from 44 submissions and ?ve invited talks. The invited talks were presented in joint sessions of both conferences. ALT 2010 was dedicated to the theoretical foundations of...

This book constitutes revised and selected papers of the 9th European Workshop on Reinforcement Learning, EWRL 2011, which took place in Athens, Greece in September 2011. The papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 40 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections online reinforcement learning, learning and exploring MDPs, function approximation methods for reinforcement learning, macro-actions in reinforcement learning, policy search and bounds, multi-task and transfer reinforcement learning, multi-agent reinforcement learning, apprenticeship and inverse...