Pioneers of reinforcement learning named Turing award winners
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This year's Turing Award — often called the Nobel Prize of computer science — is going to Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton, the pioneers of a key approach that underlies much of today's artificial intelligence.
Why it matters: Reinforcement learning, as the technique is known, posits that computers can learn from their own experiences, using a system of rewards similar to how researchers have trained animals.
In a joint interview, Barto and Sutton said the award is extremely rewarding, especially given that for much of their career, the technology they pursued was out of vogue.
- "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, though it would take decades for there to be enough computing power to test out the notion.
Catch up quick: Sutton, now a computer science professor at Canada's University of Alberta, was Barto's student at the University of Massachusetts in the late 1970s.
- Throughout the 1980s, the pair wrote a series of influential papers, culminating in their seminal 1998 textbook: "Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction," which has been cited in more than 70,000 academic papers.
- The approach finally gained prominence in the last decade as DeepMind's AlphaGo began to defeat human players.
- Reinforcement learning from human feedback is a key method for the training of large language models, while the approach has also proven useful in everything from programming robots to automating chip design.
What they're saying: Google's Jeff Dean said reinforcement learning has been central to the advancement of modern AI.
- "The tools they developed remain a central pillar of the AI boom and have rendered major advances, attracted legions of young researchers, and driven billions of dollars in investments."
- Google funds the $1 million prize given each year to the Turing Award winners.
What's next: Both Sutton and Barto believe that current fears about AI are overblown, though they acknowledge that highly intelligent systems could cause significant upheaval as society adjusts.
- Sutton said he sees AGI as the chance to introduce new "minds" into the world without having them develop biologically, through evolution.
- "I think it's a pivotal moment for our planet," Sutton said.
- Barto echoed that cautious optimism: "I think there's a lot of opportunity for these systems to improve many aspects of our life and society, assuming sufficient caution is taken."
