Andrew G. Barto and Richard S. Sutton have been announced as the winners of the 2024 Turing Award for their contributions to the field of reinforcement learning (RL), which is now used to train various artificial intelligence models such as ChatGPT and Gemini.
The announcement was made by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) yesterday with the Turing Award being the highest honor in computer science and receiving the nickname “The Nobel Prize for Computing”. Barto and Sutton have collaborated on developing techniques and algorithms for RL since 1978.
Their early research is the foundation for agents, robots and AI that now learn to perform various tasks given to them from their own mistakes and experimentation. Without Barto and Sutton’s efforts, artificial intelligence (AI) such as DeepBlue and AlphaGo would not be able to beat humans at chess and Go.
Turing Award winners receive a cash prize of $1 million. The award, whose full name is the ACM A. M. Turing Award, has been given since 1966 to recognize individual contributions to the world of computing. Previous winners include Tim Berners-Lee, Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton and Frances Allen.