AI pioneers scoop Turing Award for reinforcement learning work

Two trailblazing computer scientists have won the 2024 Turing Award for their work in reinforcement learning, a discipline in which machines learn through a reward-based trial-and-error approach that lets them adapt within constrained or dynamic environments. Andrew G. Barto, a professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst; and Richard S. Sutton, a professor at the University of Alberta, developed key algorithms and theories through a seminal series of papers starting in the 1980s. This includes work on a reinforcement technique called temporal difference learning; the duo later published an academic textbook called Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction. Esteemed mathematician Alan Turing (pictured above), after whom the Turing Award is named, also produced a paper in the 1950s called Computing Machinery and Intelligence that questioned whether computers can think and touched on similar concepts around learning from experience. In more recent years, reinforcement l ... Read full article.