I spent a fair amount of my spare time this week diving into some ancient computer science from the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s (!!!), specifically Dana Angluin’s L* algorithm for learning a finite state machine from an oracle and Rivest & Shapire’s followups and extensions. Quite beautiful work in my opinion.
L* is especially simple and elegant imo. Shapire’s valiant is more computationally efficient and I think grounded a bit better, but a little harder to understand.
Through the years I read some « old » IT books and they are still good. My favorite one is the Dragon Book by J. Ullman.
@abucci@anthony.buc.ci this one?
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10846-017-0748-6
Being a fan of A*, I didn’t know that existed