AI Reinforcement Learning Pioneers Win Turing Award

Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton are celebrated for their groundbreaking work on reinforcement learning, a key technique driving modern AI advancements.

Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton, pioneers of reinforcement learning, have been awarded the prestigious A.M. Turing Award for 2025, often called the Nobel Prize of computer science.
Reinforcement learning, which enables machines to learn from experience and feedback, has been instrumental in AI breakthroughs such as AlphaGo, ChatGPT, and robotics innovations.
The pair's foundational work in the 1980s, once considered unfashionable, has become a cornerstone of contemporary AI, influencing fields like finance, energy optimization, and chip design.
Barto and Sutton's contributions include policy-gradient methods and temporal difference learning, techniques that remain central to AI development today.
While Sutton is optimistic about AI's potential to surpass human intelligence, Barto stresses the importance of caution to mitigate unintended consequences.