Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton have been awarded this year's Turing Award for their development of reinforcement learning, a pivotal method in artificial intelligence. Reinforcement learning allows computers to learn from their experiences through a rewards system. Although initially overlooked, their efforts culminated in a widely used textbook that has influenced AI research significantly. The recognition comes after years of perseverance against prevailing trends in technology, marking a notable achievement in the context of Alan Turing's foundational ideas on machine learning.
"When we started, it was extremely unfashionable to do what we were doing," Barto told Axios. "It had been dismissed, actually, by many people."
"There were periods of time when I could not get funding because I was not doing the current fashionable topic, and I wasn't going to change to what was fashionable," he said.
Sutton added that it was "particularly gratifying" to be given this award since it was Alan Turing who proposed the notion of computers learning from their own experiences in a 1950s paper.
The approach finally gained prominence in the last decade as DeepMind's AlphaGo began to defeat human players.
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