In the 1980s, Andrew Barto and Rich Sutton were considered eccentric devotees to an elegant but ultimately doomed idea—having machines learn, as humans and animals do, from experience.
Decades on, with the technique they pioneered now increasingly critical to modern artificial intelligence and programs like ChatGPT, Barto and Sutton have been awarded the Turing Award, the highest honor in the field of computer science.
Barto, a professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Sutton, a professor at the University of Alberta, trailblazed a technique known as reinforcement learning, which involves coaxing a computer to perform tasks through
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