If you can't understand the math in that book, then you are basically not going to do better at the Formal UAI field than the crackpots have done for decades. I mean no disrespect, but nobody has actually discovered an easier to understand theory of UAI that gets equivalently good results.
A book from 1986 is definitely obsolete, and definitely applies to Narrow AI rather than AGI. The General/Universal AI field in its modern form dates to roughly the early-mid 2000s (2003ish is when AIXI was published in the Journal of Machine Learning and they got their own conference in 2005... which was kinda crackpotish).
On the other hand, to be encouraging rather than discouraging, one of the things about the AI/Machine Learning field is that you can discover far less than "ahaha, talking robots now!" and still have a useful discovery. A* Heuristic Search was a useful discovery that powers a huge fraction of modern video-game AI, even though it will never take over the world.
For instance, I read a blog post yesterday about writing improved "rock paper scissors" bots and came up with a nice little model of strategic "I know you know I know" Sicilian Reasoning that I scrawled out into a Reddit post.
As to Schmidhuber and Hutter, Google them. This is their book: http://www.amazon.com/Universal-Artificial-Intelligence-Algo...
If you can't understand the math in that book, then you are basically not going to do better at the Formal UAI field than the crackpots have done for decades. I mean no disrespect, but nobody has actually discovered an easier to understand theory of UAI that gets equivalently good results.
A book from 1986 is definitely obsolete, and definitely applies to Narrow AI rather than AGI. The General/Universal AI field in its modern form dates to roughly the early-mid 2000s (2003ish is when AIXI was published in the Journal of Machine Learning and they got their own conference in 2005... which was kinda crackpotish).
On the other hand, to be encouraging rather than discouraging, one of the things about the AI/Machine Learning field is that you can discover far less than "ahaha, talking robots now!" and still have a useful discovery. A* Heuristic Search was a useful discovery that powers a huge fraction of modern video-game AI, even though it will never take over the world.
For instance, I read a blog post yesterday about writing improved "rock paper scissors" bots and came up with a nice little model of strategic "I know you know I know" Sicilian Reasoning that I scrawled out into a Reddit post.