AI pioneers who channeled ‘hedonistic’ machines awarded

Teaching machines in the way that animal trainers mold the behaviour of dogs or horses has been an important method for developing artificial intelligence and one that was recognised Wednesday with the top computer science award.

Two pioneers in the field of reinforcement learning, Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton, are the winners of this year’s A M Turing Award, the tech world’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize.

Research that Barto, 76, and Sutton, 67, began in the late 1970s paved the way for some of the past decade’s AI breakthroughs. At the heart of their work was channeling so-called “hedonistic” machines that could continuously adapt their behaviour in response to positive signals.