We would like to congratulate the 2024 ACM A.M. Turing Award recipients Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton, who are being recognized "for developing the conceptual and algorithmic foundations of reinforcement learning."

In a series of papers beginning in the 1980s, Barto and Sutton introduced the main ideas, constructed the mathematical foundations, and developed important algorithms for reinforcement learning (RL) – one of the most important approaches for creating intelligent systems.

Although Barto and Sutton’s algorithms were developed decades ago, major advances in the practical applications of RL came about in the past fifteen years by merging RL with deep learning algorithms (pioneered by 2018 Turing Awardees Bengio, Hinton, and LeCun). This led to the technique of deep reinforcement learning.

The most prominent example of RL was the victory by the AlphaGo computer program over the best human Go players in 2016 and 2017. Another major achievement recently has been the development of the chatbot ChatGPT. ChatGPT is a large language model (LLM) trained in two phases, the second of which employs a technique called reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), to capture human expectations.

The ACM A.M. Turing Award, often referred to as the “Nobel Prize of Computing,” carries a $1 million prize with financial support provided by Google, Inc. The award is named for Alan M. Turing, the British mathematician who articulated the mathematical foundations of computing.

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