Two trailblazing laptop scientists have received the 2024 Turing Award for his or her work in reinforcement studying, a self-discipline through which machines be taught via a reward-based trial-and-error strategy that lets them adapt inside constrained or dynamic environments.
Andrew G. Barto, a professor emeritus on the College of Massachusetts Amherst; and Richard S. Sutton, a professor on the College of Alberta, developed key algorithms and theories via a seminal collection of papers beginning within the Eighties. This consists of work on a reinforcement method referred to as temporal distinction studying; the duo later revealed an educational textbook referred to as Reinforcement Studying: An Introduction.
Esteemed mathematician Alan Turing (pictured above), after whom the Turing Award is called, additionally produced a paper within the Nineteen Fifties referred to as Computing Equipment and Intelligence that questioned whether or not computer systems can suppose and touched on comparable ideas round studying from expertise.
In more moderen years, reinforcement studying has acquired extra consideration after Google Deepmind used the method to construct an AI that defeated the world’s finest AlphaGo gamers. And previously few months, Chinese language AI upstart DeepSeek hit the headlines for its game-changing R1 reasoning mannequin, which leaned closely on reinforcement studying to create cheaper basis fashions.
‘Nobel Prize for computing’
The Turing Award, administered by the Affiliation for Computing Equipment (ACM), has usually been dubbed the “Nobel Prize for computing.” Nevertheless, the Nobel Prize itself has been encroaching into the computing realm, notably round AI; Geoff Hinton and John Hopfield received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his or her work in foundational AI final 12 months. This was adopted shortly after by DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis and John Jumper who have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his or her work on AlphaFold.
“Analysis areas starting from cognitive science and psychology to neuroscience impressed the event of reinforcement studying, which has laid the foundations for a number of the most vital advances in AI and has given us higher perception into how the mind works,” ACM president Yannis Ioannidis mentioned in a press launch. “Barto and Sutton’s work shouldn’t be a stepping stone that we’ve now moved on from. Reinforcement studying continues to develop and provides nice potential for additional advances in computing and plenty of different disciplines. It’s becoming that we’re honoring them with probably the most prestigious award in our discipline.”
Different notable AI pioneers to win the Turing Award embrace Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, who was awarded the prize in 2018 alongside Geoff Hinton and Yoshua Bengio for his or her work on deep neural networks.
Barto and Sutton will share the $1 million money prize, which was supplied with help from Google.
