Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton have received the 2024 ACM A.M. Turing Award for their foundational work in reinforcement learning, a major pillar of artificial intelligence. Their research, dating back to the 1980s, introduced key algorithms such as temporal difference learning.
Sutton, a University of Alberta professor and former DeepMind scientist, and Barto, a professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, co-authored Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction, the field’s definitive text. While widely celebrated, Sutton remains skeptical of AI’s current trajectory, arguing that today’s systems mimic intelligence but fail to learn from experience.
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