This volume contains the papers presented at the 18th International Conf- ence on Algorithmic Learning Theory (ALT 2007), which was held in Sendai (Japan) during October 1-4, 2007. The main objective of the conference was to provide an interdisciplinary forum for high-quality talks with a strong theore- cal background and scienti?c interchange in areas such as query models, on-line learning, inductive inference, algorithmic forecasting, boosting, support vector machines, kernel methods, complexity and learning, reinforcement learning, - supervised learning and grammatical inference. The...

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...