Chapter 5 of Vapnick's book is much easier to read and understand after having had exposure to the previous chapters and perhaps more formal training (i.e, a class) on the subject. Even though the notion of shattering and related ideas have already been talked about in the seminar, the precise mathematical framework for discussing these ideas is needed before this chapter can be tackled.

I am very much interested in seeing a link between the theory in this chapter with the learning algorithms that apply it, like support vector machines for example. Some other questions I have are what are the theories that compete with Structural Risk minimization, and why do SVMs employ that as opposed to some other theory.

From a technical and conceptual point of view, I cannot discern between VC entropy and annealed entropy. Hopefully all of these things will be addressed tomorrow.