Preface The Faculty of Artificial Intelligence in Groningen does research on the technical aspects of cognition: reasoning, navigation, communication and learning. A technical approach requires its representations and algorithms to be robust and easy to use. It adds a crucial constraint to its domain of research: that of complexity. But complexity is more than a prominent constraint on real wor...

Benchmark problems should be hard. True. Methods for solving problems should be useful for more than just “beating” a particular benchmark. Truer still, we believe. In this paper, we examine the worth of the approach consisting of concentration on a particular set of benchmark problems, an issue raised by a recent paper by Ian Gent. We find that such a methodology can easily lead to publication...

First some context. In supervised learning in general, the goal is to learn or infer an (initially) unknown function f : x 7→ y, from a set of training data in the form of T “input/output” pairs {(xμ, yμ)}μ=1:T . 1 More generally, you try to infer the conditional distribution ρ(y|x) from this training set; the reason is that in general your outputs contains some noise (or stated better, trial-t...