Book excerpt: Self-driving cars, natural language recognition, and online recommendation engines are all possible thanks to machine learning. Discover machine learning algorithms using a handful of self-contained recipes. Create your own genetic algorithms, nature-inspired swarms, Monte Carlo simulations, and cellular automata. Find minima and maxima, using hill climbing and simulated annealing. Try selection mathods, including tournament and roulette wheels. Learn about heuristics, fitness functions, metrics, and clusters.