Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto Win 2024 Turing Award | Hacker News Reader

Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto Win 2024 Turing Award

awards.acm.org

520 pointscamlinke112 comments

Very cool to see this! It turns out my wife and I bought Andy Barto’s (and his wife’s) house.

During the process, there was a bidding war. They said “make your prime offer” so, knowing he was a mathematician, we made an offer that was a prime number :-)

So neat to see him be recognized for his work.

This is a crazy story!! Hahaha wow. What was the prime number?

Ha haa, that is fantastic. You should have joked and said - "I'd like to keep things even between us, how about $2?"

> we made an offer that was a prime number

$12345678910987654321?

Nice! Well deserved. They make both editions of their RL textbook available as a free to read PDF. I have been a paid AI practitioner since 1982, and I must admit that RL is one subject I personally struggle mastering, and the Sutton/Barto book, the Cousera series on RL taught by Professors White and White, etc. personally helped me: recommended!

EDIT: the example programs for their book are available in Common Lisp and Python. http://incompleteideas.net/book/the-book-2nd.html

Good time to re-read The Bitter Lesson: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~eunsol/courses/data/bitter_lesson...

Indeed a bitter lesson. I once enjoyed encoding human knowledge into a computer because it gives me understanding of what's going on. Now everything is becoming a big black box that is hard to reason about. /sigh/

Also, Moore's law has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Now more than ever, AI is putting a lot of demand on computational power, to the point which drives chip makers to create specialized hardware for it. It's becoming a flywheel.

I am still hoping AI progress will get to the point where the AI can eventually create AI's that are built up out of robust and provable logic which can be read and audited. Until that time, I wouldn't trust it for risky stuff. Unfortunately, it's not my choice and within a scarily short timespan, black boxes will make painfully wrong decisions about vital things that will ruin lives.

AI assisted theorem provers will go a bit in that direction. You may not know exactly how they managed to construct a proof, but you can examine that proof in detail and verify its correctness.

Yes, I have a small team of (me being 1/3) doing formal verification in my company and we do this and it doesn't actually matter if how the AI got there; we can mathematically say it's correct which is what matters. We do (and did) program synthesis and proofs but this is all very far from doing anything serious at scale.

What kind of company needs formal verification? Real time systems?

Real time / embedded / etc for money handling, healthcare, aviation/transport... And 'needs' is a loaded term; the biggest $ contributors to formal verification progress are blockchain companies these days while a lot of critical systems are badly written, outsourced things that barely have tests.

My worst fear, which is happening because it works-ish, is vague/fuzzy systems being the software because it's so like humans and we don't have anything else. It's a terrible idea, but of course we are in a hurry.

Companies designing digital circuits use it all the time.

Say you have a module written in VHDL or Verilog and it is passing regressions and everyone is happy. But as the author, you know the code is kind of a mess and you want to refactor the logic. Yes, you can make your edits and then run a few thousand directed tests and random regressions and hope that any error you might have made will be detected. Or you can use formal verification and prove that the two versions of your source code are functionally identical. And the kicker is it often takes minutes to formally prove it, vs hundreds to thousands of CPU hours to run a regression suite.

At some point the source code is mapped from a RTL language to gates, and later those gates get mapped to a mask set. The software to do that is complex and can have bugs. The fix is to extract the netlist from the masks and then formally verify that the extracted netlist matches the original RTL source code.

If your code has assertions (and it should), formal verification can be used to find counter examples that disprove the assertion.

But there are limitations. Often logic is too complex and the proof is bounded: it can show that from some initial state no counter example can be found in, say, 18 cycles, but there might be a bug that takes at least 20 cycles to expose. Or it might find counter examples and you find it arises only in illegal situations, so you have to manually add constraints to tell it which input sequences are legal (which often requires modeling the behavior of the module, and that itself can have bugs...).

The formal verifiers that I'm familiar with are really a collection of heuristic algorithms and a driver which tries various approaches for a certain amount of time before switching to a different algorithm to see if that one can crack the nut. Often, when a certain part of the design can be proven equivalent, it aids in making further progress, so it is an iterative thing, not a simple "try each one in turn". The frustrating thing is you can run formal on a module and it will prove there are no violations with a bounded depth of, say, 32 cycles. A week later a new release of your formal tool comes out with bug fixes and enhancements. Great! And now that module might have a proof depth of 22 cycles, even though nothing changed in the design.

>AI can eventually create AI's that are built up out of robust and provable logic

That's the approach behind Max Tegmark and Steven Omohundro's "Provably Safe AGI":

https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.01933

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhMwkk6uOK8

However, there are issues. How do you even begin to formalize concepts like human well-being?

> However there are issues. How do you even begin to formalize concepts like human well-being?

Oh agreed! But with AI we might(!) have the luxury to create different types of brains; logically correct brains for space flight, building structures (or at least the calcuations), taxes, accounting, physics, math etc and brains with feelings for many other things. Have those cooperate.

ps. thanks for the links!

The only problem is that "logical correctness" depends on the limits of human brain too: formal logic is based on the usual pre-accepted assumptions and definitions ("axioms").

This is what I consider the limit of the human mind: we have to start with a few assumptions we can't "prove" to build even a formal logic system which we then use to build all the other provably correct systems, but we still add other axioms to make them work.

It's hard for me to even think how AI can help with that.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custode...

excerpt of the first few paragraphs, sorry about any wrong formatting, links becoming plain text, etc. just pasted it as is:

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? is a Latin phrase found in the Satires (Satire VI, lines 347–348), a work of the 1st–2nd century Roman poet Juvenal. It may be translated as "Who will guard the guards themselves?" or "Who will watch the watchmen?".

The original context deals with the problem of ensuring marital fidelity, though the phrase is now commonly used more generally to refer to the problem of controlling the actions of persons in positions of power, an issue discussed by Plato in the Republic.[citation needed] It is not clear whether the phrase was written by Juvenal, or whether the passage in which it appears was interpolated into his works. Original context edit

The phrase, as it is normally quoted in Latin, comes from the Satires of Juvenal, the 1st–2nd century Roman satirist. Although in its modern usage the phrase has wide-reaching applications to concepts such as tyrannical governments, uncontrollably oppressive dictatorships, and police or judicial corruption and overreach, in context within Juvenal's poem it refers to the impossibility of enforcing moral behaviour on women when the enforcers (custodes) are corruptible (Satire 6, 346–348):

audio quid ueteres olim moneatis amici, "pone seram, cohibe." sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes? cauta est et ab illis incipit uxor.

I hear always the admonishment of my friends: "Bolt her in, constrain her!" But who will watch the watchmen? The wife plans ahead and begins with them!

Apologies for taking the phrase in a slightly farcical (& incurious ?) direction:

   Who will take custody of the custodians?

#!/usr/bin/badlatininterpreter

no comprendere tu commentum

but

apologia unneeded est

"Take custody" => infantilize, as of children => handling people with power like children => copium, wankery

Apologia not uh in the realm of consideration, marginally insightful because shitty latin marginally enjoyable

Well, take compiler optimization for example. You can allow your AI to use correctness-preserving transformations only. This will give you correct output no matter how weird the AI behaves.

The downside is that you will sometimes not get the optimizations that you want. But, this is sort of already the case, even with human made optimization algorithms.

Canonical URL: <http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html>

This depends a little bit on what the goal of AI research is. If it is (and it might well be) to build machines that excel at tasks previously thought to be exclusively reserved to, or needing to involve, the human mind, then these bitter lessons are indeed worthwhile.

But if you do AI research with the idea that by teaching machines how to do X, we might also be able to gain insight in how people do X, then ever more complex statistical setups will be of limited information.

Note that I'm not taking either point of view here. I just want to point out that perhaps a more nuanced approach might be called for here.

> if you do AI research with the idea that by teaching machines how to do X, we might also be able to gain insight in how people do X, then ever more complex statistical setups will be of limited information

At the very least we know consistent language and vision abilities don't require lived experience. That is huge in itself, it was unexpected.

Is that true though given e.g. the hallucinations you regularly get from LLMs?

> At the very least we know consistent language and vision abilities don't require lived experience.

I don't think that's true. A good chunk of the progress done in the last years is driven by investing thousand of man-hours asking them "Our LLM failed at answering X. How would you answer this question?". So there's definitely some "lived experience by proxy" going on.

I remember the article, and remember how badly it missed the point... The goal of writing a chess program that could beat a world champion wasn't to beat the world champion... the goal was to gain understanding into how anyone can play chess well. The victory in that match would've been equivalent to eg. drugging Kasparov prior to the match, or putting a gun to his head and telling him to lose: even cheaper and more effective.

"The goal of Automated driving is not to drive automatically but to understand how anyone can drive well"...

The goal of DeepBlue was to beat the human with a machine, nothing more.

While the conquest of deeper understanding is used for a lot of research, most AI (read modern DL) research is not about understanding human intelligence, but automatic things we could not do before. (Understanding human intelligence is nowadays a different field)

Seems like you missed the point too: I'm not talking about DeepBlue, I'm talking about using the game of chess as a "lab rat" in order to understand something more general. DeepBlue was the opposite to the desire of understanding "something more general". It just found a creative way to cheat at chess. Like that Japanese pole jumper (I think he was Japanese, cannot find this atm) who instead of jumping learned how to climb a stationary pole, and, in this way, won a particular contest.

> most AI (read modern DL) research is not about understanding human intelligence, but automatic things we could not do before.

Yes, and that's a bad thing. I don't care if shopping site recommendations are 82% accurate rather than 78%, or w/e. We've traded an attempt at answering an immensely important question for a fidget spinner.

> Understanding human intelligence is nowadays a different field

And what would that be?

This describes Go AIs as a brute force strategy with no heuristics, which is false as far as I know. Go AIs don't search the entire sample space, they search based on their training data of previous human games.

The paragraph on Go AI looked accurate to me. Go AI research spent decades trying to incorporate human-written rules about tactics and strategy. None of that is used any more, although human knowledge is leveraged a bit in the strongest programs when choosing useful features to feed into the neural nets. (Strong) Go AIs are not trained on human games anymore. Indeed they don't search the entire sample space when they perform MCTS, but I don't see Sutton claiming that they do.

> ... This describes Go AIs as a brute force strategy with no heuristics ...

no, not really, from the paper

>> Also important was the use of learning by self play to learn a value function (as it was in many other games and even in chess, although learning did not play a big role in the 1997 program that first beat a world champion). Learning by self play, and learning in general, is like search in that it enables massive computation to be brought to bear.

important notion here is, imho "learning by self play". required heuristics emerge out of that. they are not programmed in.

First there was AlphaGo, which had learnt from human games, then further improved from self-play, then there was AlphaGo Zero which taught itself from scratch just by self-play, not using any human data at all.

Game programs like AlphaGo and AlphaZero (chess) are all brute force at core - using MCTS (Monte Carlo Tree Search) to project all potential branching game continuations many moves ahead. Where the intelligence/heuristics comes to play is in pruning away unpromising branches from this expanding tree to keep the search space under control; this is done by using a board evaluation function to assess the strength of a given considered board position and assess if it is worth continuing to evaluate that potential line of play.

In DeepBlue (old IBM "chess computer" that beat Kasparov) the board evalation function was hand written using human chess expertise. In modern neural-net based engines such as AlphaGo and AlphaZero, the board evaluation function is learnt - either from human games and/or from self-play, learning what positions lead to winning outcomes.

So, not just brute force, but that (MCTS) is still the core of the algorithm.

This a somewhat uninteresting matter of semantics, but I think brute force generally refers to exhaustive search. MCTS is not brute force for that very reason (the vast majority of branches are never searched at all).

OK, but I think it's generally understood that exhaustive search is not feasible for games like Chess and Go, so when "brute force" is used in this context it means an emphasis on deep search and number of positions evaluated rather than the human approach where many orders of magnitude less positions are evaluated.

I think that kind of erodes the meaning of the phrase. A typical MCTS run for alphazero would evaluate what, like 1024 rollouts? Maybe less? That's a drop in the ocean compared to the number of states available in chess. If you call that brute force then basically everything is.

I've personally viewed well over a hundred thousand rollouts in my training as a chess bot =P

> Game programs like AlphaGo and AlphaZero (chess) are all brute force at core -

What do you call 2500 years of human game play if not brute force? Cultural evolution took 300K years, quite a lot of resources if you ask me.

Either you missed an /s or I am very interested to hear you unpack this a little bit. If you are serious, it just turns "brute force" into a kind of empty signifier anyway.

What do you call the attraction of bodies if not love? What is an insect if not a little human?

That 2500 years of game play is reflected in chess theory and book openings, what you might consider as pre-training vs test time compute.

A human grandmaster might calculate 20-ply ahead, but only for a very limited number of lines, unlike a computer engine that may evaluate millions of positions for each move.

Pattern matching vs search (brute force) is a trade off in games like Chess and Go, and humans and MCTS-based engines are at opposite ends of the spectrum.

The Bitter Lesson seems to be generally accepted knowledge in the field. Wouldn't that make DeepSeek R1 even more of a breakthrough?

that was “bitter lesson” in action.

for example there are clever ways of rewarding all the steps of a reasoning process to train a network to “think”. but deepseek found these don’t work as well as much simpler yes/no feedback on examples of reasoning.

Oof. Imagine the bitter lesson classical NLP practitioners learned. That paper is as true today as ever.

> In computer vision, there has been a similar pattern. Early methods conceived of vision as searching for edges, or generalized cylinders, or in terms of SIFT features. But today all this is discarded.Modern deep-learning neural networks use only the notions of convolution and certain kinds of invariances, and perform much better.

I was there, at that moment where pattern matching for vision started to die. That was not completely lost though, learning from that time is still useful on other places today.

I was an undergrad interning in a computer vision lab in the early 2010s. During group meeting, someone presented a new paper that was using abstract machine learning like stuff to do vision. The prof was so visibly perturbed and agnostic. He could not believe that this approach was even a little bit viable, when it so clearly was.

Best lesson for me - vowed never to be the person opposed to new approaches that work.

> Best lesson for me - vowed never to be the person opposed to new approaches that work.

I think you'll be surprised at how hard that will be to do. The reason many people feel that way is because: (a) they've become an expert (often recognized) in the old approach. (b) They make significant money (or something else).

At the end of the day, when a new approach greatly encroaches into your way of life -- you'll likely push back. Just think about the technology that you feel you derive the most benefit from today. And then think if tomorrow someone created something marginally better at its core task, but for which you no longer reap any of the rewards.

Of course it is difficult, for precisely the reasons you indicate. It's one of those lifetime skills that you have to continuously polish, and if you fall behind it is incredibly hard to recover. But such skills are necessary for being a resilient person.

You are acting like it was obvious that machine learning was the future, but this person was just stubborn. I don't think that was necessarily the case in the early 2010s and skepticism was warranted. If you see results and ignore them, sure that is a problem. But it wasn't until ML vision results really started dominating conferences such as CVPR that it became clear. It's all a tradeoff of exploration/exploitation.

nice read and insightful

Their book "Introduction to Reinforcement Learning" is one of the most accessible texts in the AI/ML field, highly recommend reading it.

I've tried descending down the RL branch, always seem way out of my depth with those formulas and star-this, star-that.

Yeah, the formalisations can be hard to crunch through (especially because of [1]). But this book in particular is quite well laid out. I'd suggest getting a math background on the (very) basics of "contraction mappings", as this is something the book kind of assumes you have the knowledge of.

[1] There's a lot of confusing naming. For example, due to its historic ties with behavioural psychology, there are a bunch of things called "eligibility traces" and so on. Also, even more than the usual "obscurity through notation" seen in all of math and AI, early RL literature in particular has particularly bad notation. You'd see the same letter mean completely different things (sometimes even opposite!) in two different papers.

You mean "Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction"? Or did they write another one?

Yeah that one. Messed up the name.

What is your background? Unfortunately I did not find it very accessible.

That book is a joy. Strong recommend.

They should have given it to some physicists to make it even.

Good time to remind everyone that Sutton is a human successionist and doesn't care if humans all die. He is not to be trusted nor celebrated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgHFMolXs3U

This is so silly. Do you imagine temporal difference learning is some kind of human successionist plot?

The video is not about his technical work but rather his view that AI will or should take over the future.

But the Turing Award is for his technical work.

Sure, and his other views - in the scope of his professional expertise but also quite relevant to, uh, other humans - seem relevant in an HN thread about the Turing award. This place isn't exactly restricted to technical discussion of the details of RL algorithms, and it's pretty fair for humans to have views on whether we ought to be replaced.

It's not just one Youtube video, it's a repeatedly expressed view:

https://x.com/RichardSSutton/status/1575619655778983936

Valuing technological advance for its own sake "beyond good and bad" is an admirably clear statement of how a lot of researchers operate, but that's the best I can say for it.

The statement I take issue with is that Sutton "is not to be celebrated or trusted". Which I can only interpret to mean that the speaker does not think that Sutton should be celebrated or trusted. (And they've chosen to state it in a kind of pompous way.) Which I think is too strong on both counts. I (and apparently the ACM) think that Sutton should be celebrated for his technical accomplishments. Also, I think he probably can be trusted on a lot of technical matters. Should he be trusted on matters of whether there need to be safeguards on AI research imposed by the state? Maybe not, but those are only a subset of all the matters.

Very disappointing. I do not understand how people earnestly defend the successionist view as a good future, but I thought he might at least give some interesting arguments.

This talk isn't that. There are no substantive arguments for why we should embrace this future and his representation of the opposite side isn't in good faith either, instead he chose to present straw-man versions of them.

He concludes with "A successful succession offers [...] the best hope for a long-term future for humanity. How this can possibly be true when ai succession necessarily includes replacement eludes me. He does mention transhumanism on a slide, but it seems extremely unlikely that he's actually talking about that and the whole succession spiel is just unfortunate wording.

> ai succession necessarily includes replacement

How is AI going to make its own chips and energy? The supply chain for AI hardware is long an fragile. AGI will have an interest in maintaining peace for this reason.

And why would it replace us, our thoughts are like food for AI. Our bodies are very efficient and mobile, biology will certainly be an option for AGI at some point.

Robotics is a software problem now, see the Tesla, Figure or Unitree humanoid bots. An AI can be totally embodied and humans will have little or no value as labor at all.

>How is AI going to make its own chips and energy?

OK, so do you support laws preventing chip manufacturers and energy providers from becoming reliant on AI?

> How is AI going to make its own chips and energy?

Pay naive humans take care of those things while it has to, then disassemble the atoms in their human bodies into raw materials for robots/datacenters once that is no longer necessary

I'm not trying to be edgy or misanthropic but I don't understand why would you attach emotional value to the abstract concept of existence of humanity over next millennia. Isn't it the same kind of extrapolation of kin selection instincts far into the domain of values as for example favouring your race over others?

To me robots are just as cool.

I think he is trying to take the positive side of what is probably an inetability.

Or we could just you know, not build the thing that will probably kill us all and at minimum will obsolete all our labor value.

Given that strategy has never worked in the history of the world, it's probably a good time to figure out how we will put the right guardrails in place and how we will adjust to the new normal.

If "we" don't build it, someone else will.

The ACM award is for their professional academic achievements - this fetishism to dig into another person’s personal life and find the most weird thing they said as the thing that paints over all of their life’s achievements as evil must stop.

It’s silly and dangerous. Because you don’t like thing A and they said/did thing A all of their lofty accomplishments get nullified by anyone. And worst of all internet gives your opinion the same weight as someone else (or the rest of us) who knows a lot about thing B that could change the world. From a strictly professional capacity.

This works me up because this is what’s dividing up people right now at a much larger scale.

I wish you well.

>this fetishism to dig into another person’s personal life and find the most weird thing they said as the thing that paints over all of their life’s achievements as evil must stop.

This has nothing to do with his professional life. He has made these comments in a professional capacity at an industry AI conference... The rest of your comment is a total non sequitur.

>And worst of all internet gives your opinion the same weight as someone else (or the rest of us) who knows a lot about thing B that could change the world. From a strictly professional capacity.

I've worked professionally in the ML field for 7 years so don't try some appeal to authority bs on me. Geoff Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Demis Hassabis, Dario Amodei and countless other leaders in the field all recognize and highlight the possible dangers of this technology.

> This has nothing to do with his professional life.

you mean his personal life?

oops, yes.

It just feels like a smear on his character: Imagine working on RL incrementally without any lofty goals or preconceived evil.

I do agree that there is some level of inherent safety issues with such technologies - but look at atomic bomb vs fission reactors etc: history paves a way through positivity.

Just because someone had an idea that eventually turned to have some evil branch off way further from the root idea doesn't mean they started with the evil idea in the first place or worse, someone else won't.

People left careers in AI in the 1990s because they came to realize that the tech would probably eventually become dangerous. Many more (including the star student in my CS program in the 1980s) never started a career in AI for the same reason.

Sutton and everyone else who has advanced the field deserve condemnation IMO, not awards.

>the most weird thing they said

Reminds me of a quote from Jean Cocteau, of which I could not find the exact words, but which roughly says that if the public knew what thoughts geniuses can have, it would be more terrified than admiring.

> all of their lofty accomplishments get nullified by anyone

I don't think it's a question of whether their achievements are nullified, but as you mention, how to weight the opinions of various people. Personally, I think both a Turing award for technical achievement and a view that humanity ought to be replaced are relevant in evaluating someone's opinions on AI policy, and we shouldn't forget the latter because of the former.

(Also, this isn't about Sutton's personal life - that's a pretty bad strawman.)

By "view that humanity," do you mean alignment with the effective altruism cult?

Repressive laws on open AI/models—giving elites total control in the name of safety?

And this alternative perspective from the cult should disqualify someone from a Turing Award despite their achievements?

No, a "view that humanity ought to be replaced" is Sutton's, not an EA view. I'm not quite sure how you read that otherwise, except that you seem very angry. I sure hope our alternatives are better than human extinction or total control by elites...

At least his Twitter profile no longer has the bitcoin-meme-red-eyes thing.

Have you ever met Sutton? He is the most heart-warming, caring and passionate hippy I have ever met. He does not want all humans to die. The talk you link also doesn't support your claim. Perhaps I missed it, in that case, do leave a timestamp.

In the talk, he says it will lead to an era of prosperity for humanity, however without humanity being in sole control of their destiny. His conclusion slide (at 12:33) literally has the bullet point "the best hope for a long-term future for humanity". That is opposite to you saying he "doesn't care if humans all die".

If I plan for my succession, I don't hope nor expect my daughter will murder me. I'm hoping for a long retirement in good health after which I will quietly pass in my sleep, knowing I left her as well as I could in a symbiotic relationship with the universe.

Here's the difference, you are not personally building the device which will cause your demise and your succession. We as humanity ARE doing that and have agency to choose NOT to do that.

It is interesting that you bring this to the attention, but I don't see why we should not trust or celebrate someone if they have views that you don't agree with.

Edit: especially since I think your implied claim that Sutton would actively want everyone to die seems very much unfounded.

> doesn't care if humans all die

That seems to be a harsh and misleading framing of his position. My own reading is that he believes it is inevitable that humans will be replaced by transhumans. That seems more like wild sci-fi utopianism than ill-will. It doesn't seem like a reason to avoid celebrating his academic achievements.

> doesn't care if humans all die

His last slide literally says “best hope for a long-term future for humanity”. That’s literally the opposite of what you’re claiming.

I used their RL book for a course I taught. It's beautifully written and freely available (http://incompleteideas.net/book/the-book-2nd.html)! I kept getting distracted by the beautiful writing that I would miss the actual content.

Huge congratulations to Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton on the well-deserved Turing Award! as a student, their textbook Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction was my gateway into the field. I still remembered that how Chapter 6 on ‘Temporal Difference Learning’ fundamentally reshaped the way I thought about sequential decision-making.

a timeless classic that I still highly recommend reading today!

This is a long time coming. To see through an idea from start to finish and make this span an entire field instead of a sub chapter in a dynamic programming book.

I wish a lot more games actually ended up using RL - the place where all of this started in the first place - would be really cool!

Well deserved, RL will only gain more importance as time goes on thanks to its (and neural nets) flexibility. The bitter lesson won't feel so bitter as we scale.

Amazing that Sutton (American) chooses to live in Edmonton, AB rather than USA.

Shows he has integrity and is not a careerist focused on prestige and money above all else.

Keen is a fully remote outfit, so he can work wherever. It's pretty likely that his reputation would open that door for him no matter where he goes.

At his level it is much more than just being able to do what he wants, it’s about attracting resources and talent to accomplish his goals.

From that perspective location still matters if you want to maximise impact

As someone who grew up in Edmonton, attended the U of A, and had the good fortune of receiving an incredible CS education at a discount price, I'm incredibly grateful for his (and the other amazing professors there) immense sacrifice.

Great people and cheap cost of living, but man do I not miss the city turning into brown sludge every winter.

He's been there since he left Bell Labs, in the mid 2000's, I think. The U of A is, or was, rich with Alberta oil sands money and willing to use it to fund "curiosity-driven research", which is pretty nice if you're willing to live where the temperatures go down to -40 in the winter.

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/ai-guru-rich-sutton-dee...

He gave up his US citizenship years ago but he explains some of the reasons why he left. I'll also say that the AI research coming out of Canada is pretty great as well so I think it makes sense to do research there.

So 2025 really is the year of agents.

Built a lot of my PhD on their work 20 years ago. It really stood the test of time.

Absolutely well deserved.

Hear hear

These guys are great but unfortunately the ai sutton and barto book is really bad. You would do better with Grokking Machine Learning by trask, and then a couple months of implementing ml papers.

I second this suggestion. Read Grokking Deep Reinforcement Learning before reading Sutton. Well, the Sutton book is free, so take a peak, but if the formulas scare you then read Grokking Deep Reinforcement Learning.

These books are about different topics? Sutton and Barto is about Reinforcement learning, and the other book you mention by Trask is on Deep Learning?

The sutton and barto book is often given as an introductory ai book to people with no experience in ai or rl. This is unfortunate as it functions as neither a good rl book nor a good ai book.

Wheras the introductory book Grokking Deep Learning walks you through implementing your own pytorch, and has a portion about rl near the end, then has a follow up book on rl, and it is trivial to have your own from scratch model and framework playing tic tac toe, snake, even without any math skills beyond multiplication.

This happens without just smacking the reader with the modified bellman equation, and a bunch of chain rule backwards, and padded paragraphs intended to sell additional versions to universities.

Wonder if he's still working in AGI with Carmack.

Very well deserved !! Amazing contributions !!

This made my day! Well deserved!

RL may prove to be the most important tech going fwd due to test time compute

they deserve it. definitely recommend their book

Great!

Congratulations to Prof Barto & Prof Sutton. I'm sure the late Harry Klopf is all smiles (:

> The ACM A.M. Turing Award, often referred to as the "Nobel Prize in Computing," carries a $1 million prize with financial support provided by Google, Inc.

Good on Google, but there will be questions if their mere sponsorship in any way influences the awards.

If ACM wanted, could it not raise $1m prize money from non-profits/trusts without much hassle?

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