algorithmsbook.com (Kochenderfer’s Algorithms books)
The home of three MIT Press textbooks by mykel-kochenderfer and co-authors. One of them, Algorithms for Optimization, is this spoke’s first academic textbook source and the first non-Wikipedia, non-blog reference in the corpus.
The landing page carries no descriptive text at all — covers, titles, authors, publisher, and nothing else. Everything below comes from the book’s own sub-page.
Algorithms for Optimization (the in-scope book)
Kochenderfer & Tim A. Wheeler, MIT Press 2019, with a second-edition preview now up. The
free PDFs of both are distributed from the site under CC BY-NC-ND (attribution, non-commercial,
no derivatives), so it is freely readable but not freely remixable. Algorithms are implemented in
Julia; notebooks and course ancillaries live in the algorithmsbooks GitHub org.
Its own framing is “a comprehensive introduction to optimization with a focus on practical algorithms,” written from an engineering-design perspective. The coverage it names:
- derivatives and local descent — the gradient-based half this spoke pages as gradient-descent / stochastic-gradient-descent
- stochastic methods and population methods — where metaheuristic-optimization, genetic-algorithm and particle-swarm-optimization sit
- linear and constrained optimization — the convex-optimization side
- surrogate models — the model-based branch, i.e. bayesian-optimization
- multi-objective optimization, optimization under uncertainty, high-dimensional search, and multidisciplinary design optimization
Two of those (multi-objective, and optimization under uncertainty) are areas the spoke has no page for and no source on. That’s the gap this book exposes.
The two out-of-scope books
- Algorithms for Decision Making (Kochenderfer, Wheeler & Kyle H. Wray; MIT Press 2022) — MDPs/POMDPs and sequential decision-making under uncertainty. Not optimization of an objective function; a decision-theory/RL body this hub has no spoke for.
- Algorithms for Validation (Kochenderfer, Sydney M. Katz, Anthony L. Corso, Robert J. Moss) — unpublished, preview only. Safety validation of autonomous systems.
Same author, same publisher, same free-PDF model — noted here as cross-spoke context rather than split off.
Related
metaheuristic-optimization · bayesian-optimization · convex-optimization · mykel-kochenderfer