AI scholars win Turing Prize for technique that made possible AlphaGo's chess triumph

imaginima/Getty Images Some of the flashiest achievements in artificial intelligence in the past decade have come from a technique by which the computer acts randomly from a set of choices and is rewarded or punished for each correct or wrong move. It's the technique most famously employed in AlphaZero, Google DeepMind's 2016 program that achieved mastery at the games of chess, shogi, and Go in 2018. The same approach helped the AlphaStar program achieve "grandmaster" play in the video game Starcraft II. Also: 50 years ago the Homebrew Computer Club met for the first time - and sparked a tech revolution On Wednesday, two AI scholars were rewarded for advancing so-called reinforcement learning, a very broad approach to how a computer proceeds in an unknown environment. The Association for Computing Machinery Andrew G. Barto, professor emeritus in the Department of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Richard S. Sutton, professor of com ... Read full article.