Turing Award Recognizes Reinforcement Learning Pioneers
Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton have been awarded the 2024 ACM A.M. Turing Award for their foundational work in reinforcement learning. Their research, starting in the 1980s, laid the conceptual and algorithmic groundwork for this crucial approach to building intelligent systems. Reinforcement learning, inspired by psychology and neuroscience, uses reward signals to guide agents toward optimal behavior. Barto and Sutton developed key algorithms like temporal difference learning and policy gradient methods, and their textbook, 'Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction,' became a standard reference. The combination of reinforcement learning with deep learning has led to breakthroughs like AlphaGo and improvements in models like ChatGPT. Their work continues to shape the field of AI.
Read more