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Book AlphaGo Simplified

    Book Details:
  • Author : Mark Liu
  • Publisher : CRC Press
  • Release : 2024-08-27
  • ISBN : 1040103944
  • Pages : 408 pages

Download or read book AlphaGo Simplified written by Mark Liu and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2024-08-27 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: May 11, 1997, was a watershed moment in the history of artificial intelligence (AI): the IBM supercomputer chess engine, Deep Blue, beat the world Chess champion, Garry Kasparov. It was the first time a machine had triumphed over a human player in a Chess tournament. Fast forward 19 years to May 9, 2016, DeepMind’s AlphaGo beat the world Go champion Lee Sedol. AI again stole the spotlight and generated a media frenzy. This time, a new type of AI algorithm, namely machine learning (ML) was the driving force behind the game strategies. What exactly is ML? How is it related to AI? Why is deep learning (DL) so popular these days? This book explains how traditional rule-based AI and ML work and how they can be implemented in everyday games such as Last Coin Standing, Tic Tac Toe, or Connect Four. Game rules in these three games are easy to implement. As a result, readers will learn rule-based AI, deep reinforcement learning, and more importantly, how to combine the two to create powerful game strategies (the whole is indeed greater than the sum of its parts) without getting bogged down in complicated game rules. Implementing rule-based AI and ML in these straightforward games is quick and not computationally intensive. Consequently, game strategies can be trained in mere minutes or hours without requiring GPU training or supercomputing facilities, showcasing AI's ability to achieve superhuman performance in these games. More importantly, readers will gain a thorough understanding of the principles behind rule-based AI, such as the MiniMax algorithm, alpha-beta pruning, and Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), and how to integrate them with cutting-edge ML techniques like convolutional neural networks and deep reinforcement learning to apply them in their own business fields and tackle real-world challenges. Written with clarity from the ground up, this book appeals to both general readers and industry professionals who seek to learn about rule-based AI and deep reinforcement learning, as well as students and educators in computer science and programming courses.

Book How Smart Machines Think

Download or read book How Smart Machines Think written by Sean Gerrish and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-10-22 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Everything you want to know about the breakthroughs in AI technology, machine learning, and deep learning—as seen in self-driving cars, Netflix recommendations, and more. The future is here: Self-driving cars are on the streets, an algorithm gives you movie and TV recommendations, IBM’s Watson triumphed on Jeopardy over puny human brains, computer programs can be trained to play Atari games. But how do all these things work? In this book, Sean Gerrish offers an engaging and accessible overview of the breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and machine learning that have made today’s machines so smart. Gerrish outlines some of the key ideas that enable intelligent machines to perceive and interact with the world. He describes the software architecture that allows self-driving cars to stay on the road and to navigate crowded urban environments; the million-dollar Netflix competition for a better recommendation engine (which had an unexpected ending); and how programmers trained computers to perform certain behaviors by offering them treats, as if they were training a dog. He explains how artificial neural networks enable computers to perceive the world—and to play Atari video games better than humans. He explains Watson’s famous victory on Jeopardy, and he looks at how computers play games, describing AlphaGo and Deep Blue, which beat reigning world champions at the strategy games of Go and chess. Computers have not yet mastered everything, however; Gerrish outlines the difficulties in creating intelligent agents that can successfully play video games like StarCraft that have evaded solution—at least for now. Gerrish weaves the stories behind these breakthroughs into the narrative, introducing readers to many of the researchers involved, and keeping technical details to a minimum. Science and technology buffs will find this book an essential guide to a future in which machines can outsmart people.

Book Neural Networks and Deep Learning

Download or read book Neural Networks and Deep Learning written by Charu C. Aggarwal and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-06-29 with total page 542 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book covers both classical and modern models in deep learning. The primary focus is on the theory and algorithms of deep learning. The theory and algorithms of neural networks are particularly important for understanding important concepts, so that one can understand the important design concepts of neural architectures in different applications. Why do neural networks work? When do they work better than off-the-shelf machine-learning models? When is depth useful? Why is training neural networks so hard? What are the pitfalls? The book is also rich in discussing different applications in order to give the practitioner a flavor of how neural architectures are designed for different types of problems. Deep learning methods for various data domains, such as text, images, and graphs are presented in detail. The chapters of this book span three categories: The basics of neural networks: The backpropagation algorithm is discussed in Chapter 2. Many traditional machine learning models can be understood as special cases of neural networks. Chapter 3 explores the connections between traditional machine learning and neural networks. Support vector machines, linear/logistic regression, singular value decomposition, matrix factorization, and recommender systems are shown to be special cases of neural networks. Fundamentals of neural networks: A detailed discussion of training and regularization is provided in Chapters 4 and 5. Chapters 6 and 7 present radial-basis function (RBF) networks and restricted Boltzmann machines. Advanced topics in neural networks: Chapters 8, 9, and 10 discuss recurrent neural networks, convolutional neural networks, and graph neural networks. Several advanced topics like deep reinforcement learning, attention mechanisms, transformer networks, Kohonen self-organizing maps, and generative adversarial networks are introduced in Chapters 11 and 12. The textbook is written for graduate students and upper under graduate level students. Researchers and practitioners working within this related field will want to purchase this as well. Where possible, an application-centric view is highlighted in order to provide an understanding of the practical uses of each class of techniques. The second edition is substantially reorganized and expanded with separate chapters on backpropagation and graph neural networks. Many chapters have been significantly revised over the first edition. Greater focus is placed on modern deep learning ideas such as attention mechanisms, transformers, and pre-trained language models.

Book AI for Finance

    Book Details:
  • Author : Edward P. K. Tsang
  • Publisher : CRC Press
  • Release : 2023-06-02
  • ISBN : 1000878570
  • Pages : 109 pages

Download or read book AI for Finance written by Edward P. K. Tsang and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2023-06-02 with total page 109 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finance students and practitioners may ask: can machines learn everything? Could AI help me? Computing students or practitioners may ask: which of my skills could contribute to finance? Where in finance should I pay attention? This book aims to answer these questions. No prior knowledge is expected in AI or finance. Including original research, the book explains the impact of ignoring computation in classical economics; examines the relationship between computing and finance and points out potential misunderstandings between economists and computer scientists; and introduces Directional Change and explains how this can be used. To finance students and practitioners, this book will explain the promise of AI, as well as its limitations. It will cover knowledge representation, modelling, simulation and machine learning, explaining the principles of how they work. To computing students and practitioners, this book will introduce the financial applications in which AI has made an impact. This includes algorithmic trading, forecasting, risk analysis portfolio optimization and other less well-known areas in finance. Trading depth for readability, AI for Finance will help readers decide whether to invest more time into the subject.

Book Reinforcement Learning From Scratch

Download or read book Reinforcement Learning From Scratch written by Uwe Lorenz and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-10-27 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In ancient games such as chess or go, the most brilliant players can improve by studying the strategies produced by a machine. Robotic systems practice their own movements. In arcade games, agents capable of learning reach superhuman levels within a few hours. How do these spectacular reinforcement learning algorithms work? With easy-to-understand explanations and clear examples in Java and Greenfoot, you can acquire the principles of reinforcement learning and apply them in your own intelligent agents. Greenfoot (M.Kölling, King's College London) and the hamster model (D. Bohles, University of Oldenburg) are simple but also powerful didactic tools that were developed to convey basic programming concepts. The result is an accessible introduction into machine learning that concentrates on reinforcement learning. Taking the reader through the steps of developing intelligent agents, from the very basics to advanced aspects, touching on a variety of machine learning algorithms along the way, one is allowed to play along, experiment, and add their own ideas and experiments.

Book Deep Learning and the Game of Go

Download or read book Deep Learning and the Game of Go written by Kevin Ferguson and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2019-01-06 with total page 611 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Summary Deep Learning and the Game of Go teaches you how to apply the power of deep learning to complex reasoning tasks by building a Go-playing AI. After exposing you to the foundations of machine and deep learning, you'll use Python to build a bot and then teach it the rules of the game. Foreword by Thore Graepel, DeepMind Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications. About the Technology The ancient strategy game of Go is an incredible case study for AI. In 2016, a deep learning-based system shocked the Go world by defeating a world champion. Shortly after that, the upgraded AlphaGo Zero crushed the original bot by using deep reinforcement learning to master the game. Now, you can learn those same deep learning techniques by building your own Go bot! About the Book Deep Learning and the Game of Go introduces deep learning by teaching you to build a Go-winning bot. As you progress, you'll apply increasingly complex training techniques and strategies using the Python deep learning library Keras. You'll enjoy watching your bot master the game of Go, and along the way, you'll discover how to apply your new deep learning skills to a wide range of other scenarios! What's inside Build and teach a self-improving game AI Enhance classical game AI systems with deep learning Implement neural networks for deep learning About the Reader All you need are basic Python skills and high school-level math. No deep learning experience required. About the Author Max Pumperla and Kevin Ferguson are experienced deep learning specialists skilled in distributed systems and data science. Together, Max and Kevin built the open source bot BetaGo. Table of Contents PART 1 - FOUNDATIONS Toward deep learning: a machine-learning introduction Go as a machine-learning problem Implementing your first Go bot PART 2 - MACHINE LEARNING AND GAME AI Playing games with tree search Getting started with neural networks Designing a neural network for Go data Learning from data: a deep-learning bot Deploying bots in the wild Learning by practice: reinforcement learning Reinforcement learning with policy gradients Reinforcement learning with value methods Reinforcement learning with actor-critic methods PART 3 - GREATER THAN THE SUM OF ITS PARTS AlphaGo: Bringing it all together AlphaGo Zero: Integrating tree search with reinforcement learning

Book

    Book Details:
  • Author :
  • Publisher : Springer Nature
  • Release :
  • ISBN : 3031648323
  • Pages : 382 pages

Download or read book written by and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book Artificial Intelligence

Download or read book Artificial Intelligence written by Robert H. Chen and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2022-06-09 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Artificial Intelligence: An Introduction for the Inquisitive Reader guides readers through the history and development of AI, from its early mathematical beginnings through to the exciting possibilities of its potential future applications. To make this journey as accessible as possible, the authors build their narrative around accounts of some of the more popular and well-known demonstrations of artificial intelligence including Deep Blue, AlphaGo and even Texas Hold’em, followed by their historical background, so that AI can be seen as a natural development of mathematics and computer science. As the book moves forward, more technical descriptions are presented at a pace that should be suitable for all levels of readers, gradually building a broad and reasonably deep understanding and appreciation for the basic mathematics, physics, and computer science that is rapidly developing artificial intelligence as it is today. Features Only mathematical prerequisite is an elementary knowledge of calculus Accessible to anyone with an interest in AI and its mathematics and computer science Suitable as a supplementary reading for a course in AI or the History of Mathematics and Computer Science in regard to artificial intelligence.

Book Python Deep Learning

    Book Details:
  • Author : Valentino Zocca
  • Publisher : Packt Publishing Ltd
  • Release : 2017-04-28
  • ISBN : 1786460661
  • Pages : 406 pages

Download or read book Python Deep Learning written by Valentino Zocca and published by Packt Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2017-04-28 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Take your machine learning skills to the next level by mastering Deep Learning concepts and algorithms using Python. About This Book Explore and create intelligent systems using cutting-edge deep learning techniques Implement deep learning algorithms and work with revolutionary libraries in Python Get real-world examples and easy-to-follow tutorials on Theano, TensorFlow, H2O and more Who This Book Is For This book is for Data Science practitioners as well as aspirants who have a basic foundational understanding of Machine Learning concepts and some programming experience with Python. A mathematical background with a conceptual understanding of calculus and statistics is also desired. What You Will Learn Get a practical deep dive into deep learning algorithms Explore deep learning further with Theano, Caffe, Keras, and TensorFlow Learn about two of the most powerful techniques at the core of many practical deep learning implementations: Auto-Encoders and Restricted Boltzmann Machines Dive into Deep Belief Nets and Deep Neural Networks Discover more deep learning algorithms with Dropout and Convolutional Neural Networks Get to know device strategies so you can use deep learning algorithms and libraries in the real world In Detail With an increasing interest in AI around the world, deep learning has attracted a great deal of public attention. Every day, deep learning algorithms are used broadly across different industries. The book will give you all the practical information available on the subject, including the best practices, using real-world use cases. You will learn to recognize and extract information to increase predictive accuracy and optimize results. Starting with a quick recap of important machine learning concepts, the book will delve straight into deep learning principles using Sci-kit learn. Moving ahead, you will learn to use the latest open source libraries such as Theano, Keras, Google's TensorFlow, and H20. Use this guide to uncover the difficulties of pattern recognition, scaling data with greater accuracy and discussing deep learning algorithms and techniques. Whether you want to dive deeper into Deep Learning, or want to investigate how to get more out of this powerful technology, you'll find everything inside. Style and approach Python Machine Learning by example follows practical hands on approach. It walks you through the key elements of Python and its powerful machine learning libraries with the help of real world projects.

Book Deep Reinforcement Learning

Download or read book Deep Reinforcement Learning written by Aske Plaat and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-06-10 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Deep reinforcement learning has attracted considerable attention recently. Impressive results have been achieved in such diverse fields as autonomous driving, game playing, molecular recombination, and robotics. In all these fields, computer programs have taught themselves to understand problems that were previously considered to be very difficult. In the game of Go, the program AlphaGo has even learned to outmatch three of the world’s leading players.Deep reinforcement learning takes its inspiration from the fields of biology and psychology. Biology has inspired the creation of artificial neural networks and deep learning, while psychology studies how animals and humans learn, and how subjects’ desired behavior can be reinforced with positive and negative stimuli. When we see how reinforcement learning teaches a simulated robot to walk, we are reminded of how children learn, through playful exploration. Techniques that are inspired by biology and psychology work amazingly well in computers: animal behavior and the structure of the brain as new blueprints for science and engineering. In fact, computers truly seem to possess aspects of human behavior; as such, this field goes to the heart of the dream of artificial intelligence. These research advances have not gone unnoticed by educators. Many universities have begun offering courses on the subject of deep reinforcement learning. The aim of this book is to provide an overview of the field, at the proper level of detail for a graduate course in artificial intelligence. It covers the complete field, from the basic algorithms of Deep Q-learning, to advanced topics such as multi-agent reinforcement learning and meta learning.

Book Everyday Chaos

Download or read book Everyday Chaos written by David Weinberger and published by Harvard Business Press. This book was released on 2019-04-23 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Make. More. Future. Artificial intelligence, big data, modern science, and the internet are all revealing a fundamental truth: The world is vastly more complex and unpredictable than we've allowed ourselves to see. Now that technology is enabling us to take advantage of all the chaos it's revealing, our understanding of how things happen is changing--and with it our deepest strategies for predicting, preparing for, and managing our world. This affects everything, from how we approach our everyday lives to how we make moral decisions and how we run our businesses. Take machine learning, which makes better predictions about weather, medical diagnoses, and product performance than we do--but often does so at the expense of our understanding of how it arrived at those predictions. While this can be dangerous, accepting it is also liberating, for it enables us to harness the complexity of an immense amount of data around us. We are also turning to strategies that avoid anticipating the future altogether, such as A/B testing, Minimum Viable Products, open platforms, and user-modifiable video games. We even take for granted that a simple hashtag can organize unplanned, leaderless movements such as #MeToo. Through stories from history, business, and technology, philosopher and technologist David Weinberger finds the unifying truths lying below the surface of the tools we take for granted--and a future in which our best strategy often requires holding back from anticipating and instead creating as many possibilities as we can. The book’s imperative for business and beyond is simple: Make. More. Future. The result is a world no longer focused on limitations but optimized for possibilities.

Book Make Python Talk

    Book Details:
  • Author : Mark Liu
  • Publisher : No Starch Press
  • Release : 2021-08-24
  • ISBN : 1718501579
  • Pages : 438 pages

Download or read book Make Python Talk written by Mark Liu and published by No Starch Press. This book was released on 2021-08-24 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A project-based book that teaches beginning Python programmers how to build working, useful, and fun voice-controlled applications. This fun, hands-on book will take your basic Python skills to the next level as you build voice-controlled apps to use in your daily life. Starting with a Python refresher and an introduction to speech-recognition/text-to-speech functionalities, you’ll soon ease into more advanced topics, like making your own modules and building working voice-controlled apps. Each chapter scaffolds multiple projects that allow you to see real results from your code at a manageable pace, while end-of-chapter exercises strengthen your understanding of new concepts. You’ll design interactive games, like Connect Four and Tic-Tac-Toe, and create intelligent computer opponents that talk and take commands; you’ll make a real-time language translator, and create voice-activated financial-market apps that track the stocks or cryptocurrencies you are interested in. Finally, you’ll load all of these features into the ultimate virtual personal assistant – a conversational VPA that tells jokes, reads the news, and gives you hands-free control of your email, browser, music player, desktop files, and more. Along the way, you’ll learn how to: ● Build Python modules, implement animations, and integrate live data into an app ● Use web-scraping skills for voice-controlling podcasts, videos, and web searches ● Fine-tune the speech recognition to accept a variety of input ● Associate regular tasks like opening files and accessing the web with speech commands ● Integrate functionality from other programs into a single VPA with computational knowledge engines to answer almost any question Packed with cross-platform code examples to download, practice activities and exercises, and explainer images, you’ll quickly become proficient in Python coding in general and speech recognition/text to speech in particular.

Book Learning to Play

    Book Details:
  • Author : Aske Plaat
  • Publisher : Springer Nature
  • Release : 2020-12-23
  • ISBN : 3030592383
  • Pages : 330 pages

Download or read book Learning to Play written by Aske Plaat and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-12-23 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this textbook the author takes as inspiration recent breakthroughs in game playing to explain how and why deep reinforcement learning works. In particular he shows why two-person games of tactics and strategy fascinate scientists, programmers, and game enthusiasts and unite them in a common goal: to create artificial intelligence (AI). After an introduction to the core concepts, environment, and communities of intelligence and games, the book is organized into chapters on reinforcement learning, heuristic planning, adaptive sampling, function approximation, and self-play. The author takes a hands-on approach throughout, with Python code examples and exercises that help the reader understand how AI learns to play. He also supports the main text with detailed pointers to online machine learning frameworks, technical details for AlphaGo, notes on how to play and program Go and chess, and a comprehensive bibliography. The content is class-tested and suitable for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses on artificial intelligence and games. It's also appropriate for self-study by professionals engaged with applications of machine learning and with games development. Finally it's valuable for any reader engaged with the philosophical implications of artificial and general intelligence, games represent a modern Turing test of the power and limitations of AI.

Book Reinforcement Learning with TensorFlow

Download or read book Reinforcement Learning with TensorFlow written by Sayon Dutta and published by Packt Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2018-04-24 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leverage the power of the Reinforcement Learning techniques to develop self-learning systems using Tensorflow Key Features Learn reinforcement learning concepts and their implementation using TensorFlow Discover different problem-solving methods for Reinforcement Learning Apply reinforcement learning for autonomous driving cars, robobrokers, and more Book Description Reinforcement Learning (RL), allows you to develop smart, quick and self-learning systems in your business surroundings. It is an effective method to train your learning agents and solve a variety of problems in Artificial Intelligence—from games, self-driving cars and robots to enterprise applications that range from datacenter energy saving (cooling data centers) to smart warehousing solutions. The book covers the major advancements and successes achieved in deep reinforcement learning by synergizing deep neural network architectures with reinforcement learning. The book also introduces readers to the concept of Reinforcement Learning, its advantages and why it’s gaining so much popularity. The book also discusses on MDPs, Monte Carlo tree searches, dynamic programming such as policy and value iteration, temporal difference learning such as Q-learning and SARSA. You will use TensorFlow and OpenAI Gym to build simple neural network models that learn from their own actions. You will also see how reinforcement learning algorithms play a role in games, image processing and NLP. By the end of this book, you will have a firm understanding of what reinforcement learning is and how to put your knowledge to practical use by leveraging the power of TensorFlow and OpenAI Gym. What you will learn Implement state-of-the-art Reinforcement Learning algorithms from the basics Discover various techniques of Reinforcement Learning such as MDP, Q Learning and more Learn the applications of Reinforcement Learning in advertisement, image processing, and NLP Teach a Reinforcement Learning model to play a game using TensorFlow and the OpenAI gym Understand how Reinforcement Learning Applications are used in robotics Who this book is for If you want to get started with reinforcement learning using TensorFlow in the most practical way, this book will be a useful resource. The book assumes prior knowledge of machine learning and neural network programming concepts, as well as some understanding of the TensorFlow framework. No previous experience with Reinforcement Learning is required.

Book From Deep Learning to Rational Machines

Download or read book From Deep Learning to Rational Machines written by Cameron J. Buckner and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book provides a framework for thinking about foundational philosophical questions surrounding machine learning as an approach to artificial intelligence. Specifically, it links recent breakthroughs in deep learning to classical empiricist philosophy of mind. In recent assessments of deep learning's current capabilities and future potential, prominent scientists have cited historical figures from the perennial philosophical debate between nativism and empiricism, which primarily concerns the origins of abstract knowledge. These empiricists were generally faculty psychologists; that is, they argued that the active engagement of general psychological faculties-such as perception, memory, imagination, attention, and empathy-enables rational agents to extract abstract knowledge from sensory experience. This book explains a number of recent attempts to model roles attributed to these faculties in deep neural network based artificial agents by appeal to the faculty psychology of philosophers such as Aristotle, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), John Locke David Hume, William James, and Sophie de Grouchy. It illustrates the utility of this interdisciplinary connection by showing how it can provide benefits to both philosophy and computer science: computer scientists can continue to mine the history of philosophy for ideas and aspirational targets to hit on the way to more robustly rational artificial agents, and philosophers can see how some of the historical empiricists' most ambitious speculations can be realized in specific computational systems"--

Book Rethinking Opening Strategy

    Book Details:
  • Author : Yuan Zhou
  • Publisher : Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
  • Release : 2018-01-05
  • ISBN : 9781981642007
  • Pages : 74 pages

Download or read book Rethinking Opening Strategy written by Yuan Zhou and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2018-01-05 with total page 74 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The AI program AlphaGo Zero has introduced several new ideas about how to play in the opening of a game of go. Yuan Zhou, a popular go teacher, discusses several of them and shows their use in several pro games.

Book Spider Web  Labyrinth  Tightrope Walk

Download or read book Spider Web Labyrinth Tightrope Walk written by Regina Schober and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2023-08-07 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spider Web, Labyrinth, Tightrope Walk explores the shifting functions of the network as a metaphor, model, and as an epistemological framework in US American literature and culture from the 19th century until today. The book critically inquires into the literary, cultural, philosophical, and scientific rhetoric, values, and ideological underpinnings that have given rise to the network concept. Literature and culture play a major role in the ways in which networks have been imagined and how they have evolved as conceptual models. This study regards networks as historically emergent and culturally constructed formations closely tied with the development of knowledge technologies in the process of modernization as well as with an increasingly critical awareness of network technologies and infrastructures. While the rise of the network in scientific, philosophical, political and sociological discourses has received wide attention, this book contributes an important cultural and historical perspective to network theory by demonstrating how US American literature and culture have been key sites for thinking in and about networks in the past two centuries.