Writers’s reading lists: Carl Sagan’s 1954 reading list

From Library if Congress if the U.S. Carl’s Sagan’s papers.

  1. The Immoralist, by André Gide 
  2. The Republic, by Plato 
  3. What Is Mathematics?: An Elementary Approach to Ideas and Methods, by Richar Courant 
  4. Death Be Not Proud, by John Gunther 
  5. An Outline of Abnormal Psychology, by Murphy Gardner 
  6. Who Speaks for Man by, Norman Cousins 
  7. Astronomy: An Introduction, by Robert Horace Baker 
  8. The Observational Approach to Cosmology, by Edwin Powell Hubble 
  9. Quantitative aspects of the carcinogenic radiations, by Harold Thayer Davis 
  10. Star Short Novels, by Frederik Pohl (Editor) 
  11. Young Archimedes and Other Stories, by Aldous Huxley 
  12. Julius Caesar, by William Shakespeare 
  13. The Symposium, by Plato 
  14. The Autobiography of an Uneducated Man, by Robert Maynard Hutchins 
  15. Timaeus, by Plato 
  16. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, by Charles Mackay 
  17. But We Were Born Free, by Elmer Holmes Davis 
  18. A History of Western Philosophy, Volume 1: The Classical Mind, by W.T. Jones 
  19. The Portable Greek Reader, by W.H. Auden (Editor) 
  20. In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, by J. Robert Oppenheimer 
  21. The Berlitz Self-Teacher: German, by Berlitz Editors 
  22. The Uses Of The Past: Profiles Of Former Societies, by Herbert Joseph Muller
  23. Holy Bible
  24. Heat and Thermodynamics: An Intermediate Textbook, by Mark W. Zemansky Physics, by Hugh D. Young 
  25. Kinetic theory of gases: with an introduction to statistical mechanics, by Earle Hesse Kennard 
  26. Thermodynamics: An Advanced Treatment For Chemists And Physicists, by E.A. Guggenheim 
  27. Principles of electricity and electromagnetism, by Gaylord Probasco Harnwell 
  28. Theory of Functions, Parts I and II by Konrad Knopp 
  29. Advanced Calculus, by Wilfred Kaplan 
  30. Complex Analysis: An Introduction to The Theory of Analytic Functions of One Complex Variable (International Series in Pure & Applied Mathematics), by Lars Ahlfors 
  31. Introduction to electric fields: a vector analysis approach, by Walter Edwin Rogers 
  32. Electromagnetics with Applications, by John Daniel Kraus 
  33. Communication circuit fundamentals for radio and communication engineers, by Carl Edwin Smith 

“Efficient Planning under Uncertainty with Macro-actions” by R. He, E. Brunskill and N. Roy

“Deciding how to act in partially observable environments remains an active area of research. Identifying good sequences of decisions is particularly challenging when good control performance requires planning multiple steps into the future in domains with many states. Towards addressing this challenge, we present an online, forward-search algorithm called the Posterior Belief Distribution (PBD). PBD leverages a novel method for calculating the posterior distribution over beliefs that result after a sequence of actions is taken, given the set of observation sequences that could be received during this process. This method allows us to efficiently evaluate the expected reward of a sequence of primitive actions, which we refer to as macro-actions…”

“Multiagent Learning in Large Anonymous Games” by I. A. Kash, E. J. Friedman and J. Y. Halpern (2011)

In large systems, it is important for agents to learn to act effectively, but sophisticated multi-agent learning algorithms generally do not scale. An alternative approach is to find restricted classes of games where simple, efficient algorithms converge. It is shown that stage learning efficiently converges to Nash equilibria in large anonymous games if best-reply dynamics converge. Two features are identified that improve convergence. First, rather than making learning more difficult, more agents are actually beneficial in many settings. Second, providing agents with statistical information about the behavior of others can significantly reduce the number of observations needed.