Blogs to check

It might be an occupational impairment but I feel the urge to begin with a Literature Review. So, here goes my highly subjective list. For some time, I have been following several excellent research-related blogs. I also noticed some strange tendencies: there are excellent blogs on machine learning in general (half of them calling themselves “Yet another machine learning blog”), there are excellent specialized blogs on evolutionary methods, on data mining, on game AI and all kinds of game-related topics, but the reinforcement learning niche seemed strangely underpopulated until lately. We are lucky, however: the recently started RL blog has some of the biggest names in RL, Satinder Singh, Michael Littman, Peter Stone and Rich Sutton.

In the machine learning section, John Langford’s blog is an old-time favorite (and sometimes brings up RL topics, too), just like the blog of Csaba Szepesvári. Sadly, the latter seems to be dead now (although, the last time I wanted to move it to the “ex-blog” folder, new posts appeared, so probably there is hope for a revival :-)). Inductio Ex Machina by Mark Reid and ThesiLog by Amir massoud Farahmand are more recent findings, but well worth checking regularly. Genetic Argonaut and Togelius seem to be half-dead now, but used to be interesting.

As for game AI, the blog of AiGameDev is a must-have with tutorials, discussions, and regular weekly link collections of blog activity and news. Finally, I have to mention Shtetl-optimized of Scott Aaronson. His research topic (quantum complexity theory) is something I know absolutely nothing about, and is completely disjoint from RL (althogh one may never know that for sure, I’m half expecting a paper on temporal difference learning in the many-worlds interpretation). Still, the blog is insightful and witty, something I definitely want to put in the blogroll box.