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Photo Courtesy Amii

Richard Sutton, a computing science professor and a founder of computational reinforcement learning, has been honoured as co-recipient of the 2024 Association for Computing Machinery A.M. Turing Award, the most prestigious prize in computing science.

Sutton was honoured with collaborator Andrew Barto of University of Massachusetts Amherst. Reinforcement learning is a branch of AI with broad applications, from global supply chain optimization to improving the reasoning capabilities of chatbots. The award carries a prize of US$1 million, supported by Google.

AI is about understanding humanity, Sutton says. “It’s the desire to understand the world, to make tools to make ourselves better.”

He likes to say, “work on ideas, not software.” So he and Barto explored the idea of “a learning system that wants something, that adapts its behaviour to maximize a special signal from its environment.” In 1998 they co-authored Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction.

“All major areas of reinforcement learning have hundreds of researchers and papers published every year — all of that is sitting atop Rich’s foundational work,” says computing science professor Michael Bowling.

Sutton founded the Reinforcement Learning and Artificial Intelligence Lab, where he serves as a principal investigator. He served as chair of Reinforcement Learning and Artificial Intelligence at iCORE/AITF until 2018.

In 2017, he co-founded Google DeepMind Alberta, the company’s first international research lab, and he is a research scientist at Keen Technologies. Sutton’s doctoral student David Silver, alongside Sutton and Martin Müller, developed AlphaGo, a computer program that defeated the best human Go players.

The Turing Award follows many honours, and Sutton’s publications have been cited approximately 150,000 times.