2024 Turing Award

Andrew Barto and Rich Sutton have won the Turing Award “for developing the conceptual and algorithmic foundations of reinforcement learning.”

This selection would’ve been particularly close to Alan Turing’s heart because he laid out a learning system that would use rewards and feedback in his wonderful paper, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” which starts off with the most ambitious question in the last century, “I propose to consider the question, ‘Can Machines Think?’”

Also, I love their Reinforcement Learning book so much that I wouldn’t have minded a bit if they got the award simply for the educational value of that book.