**“A beautifully rendered epic journey . . . . The novel works on many levels and excels at them all.” —New York Journal of BooksIn this captivating and surprising novel of spiritual discovery—a No. 1 bestseller in India—a young American travels to India and finds himself tested physically, emotionally, and spiritually.**Max Pzoras is the poster child for the American Dream. The child of Greek immigrants who grew up in a dangerous New York housing project, he trium...

Nikhil Arya has fallen. Once, he was an Ivy League scholar with a promising future at NASA; now, at forty, he is broke, homeless, and minutes away from blowing his brains out in a diabolical modern-day joust. It wasn't meant to be this way. An innocent vacation turned into an epic intercontinental journey that saw Nikhil become first a genocide survivor, then a Buddhist monk, a drug lord, a homeless accountant, a software mogul and a deadly game fighter. Now, twenty years later, Nikhil aka...

What do you do when you are a twenty-five-year-old Yale graduate making half-a-million dollars a year as a hotshot investment banker on Wall Street? You bust your ass and become a millionaire by thirty, of course.Not if you are Samrat Ratan, born in the USA to immigrant Indian parents; you quit and enrol in business school in India instead.Samrat's rollercoaster journey begins at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) in Bangalore, where he spends his time getting high on marijuana while...

Reinforcement Learning: Foundations and Applications combines rigorous theory with real-world relevance to introduce readers to one of the most influential branches of modern Artificial Intelligence. Walking readers through the essential principles, algorithms, and techniques that define reinforcement learning (RL), the book highlights how RL enables intelligent systems to learn from interaction and optimize decision-making in domains such as robotics, autonomous control, game AI, finance,...

Most of us have discovered that life is never a straight line. It actually resembles a series of zig-zags. We zig in order to strengthen our creative gifts. We zag in order to provide a roof over our head and food on the table. This conversation looks at the life adventures of a father, a husband, a writer, a corporate marketer, a world traveler, and a meditation and yoga teacher. Karan Bajaj’s life path has been a quest to answer the question: Does our search for spiritual fulfillment and...

Reinforcement Learning: Foundations and Applications combines rigorous theory with real-world relevance to introduce readers to one of the most influential branches of modern Artificial Intelligence. Walking readers through the essential principles, algorithms, and techniques that define reinforcement learning (RL), the book highlights how RL enables intelligent systems to learn from interaction and optimize decision-making in domains such as robotics, autonomous control, game AI, finance,...