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Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton win Turing award for AI training trick

The Turing award, often considered the Nobel prize of computing, has gone to two computer scientists for their work on reinforcement learning, a key technique in training artificial intelligence models

By Alex Wilkins

5 March 2025

Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto made key breakthroughs in reinforcement learning

Dawn Gaves, University of Alberta/Zinj Guo, University of Massachusetts Amherst

and have won the 2024 Turing award, which is often called the Nobel prize of computing, for their fundamental work on ideas in machine learning that later proved crucial to the success of artificial intelligence models such as Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo.

Barto, who is now retired and lives in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, didn’t even realise he was nominated for the award. “I joined a Zoom with some people and was told and I was…

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