I just came across an article on Peter Putnam, allegedly a 20th century physicist who invented something like reinforcement learning (though the details are unclear) and was forgotten until a recent effort to dig into his cryptic writings. The whole thing doesn't seem plausible at all, since Putnam was supposed to have, among other things, donated $40M made by investments to Nature Conservancy or corresponded with Einstein and Wheeler, and yet he has left no trace other than this one article ...
