Pioneers of Reinforcement Learning Win the Turing Award
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Summary
Reinforcement learning pioneers Andrew Barto and Rich Sutton have been awarded the Turing Award, the highest honour in the field of computer science.
The University of Massachusetts Amherst professor emeritus and the University of Alberta’s professor are the creators of the technique of reinforcement learning, which is now critical to the functioning of AI systems and programmes such as ChatGPT.
Most famously, Google’s AlphaGo learnt to play Go using reinforcement learning and sparked a renewed interested in the technique.
It is now used in advertising, data centre energy use, chip design and in robotics to help machines learn new physical tasks.
However, Rich Sutton commented that the next step would be to remove human input entirely and allow machines to learn entirely by themselves.
