AI scholars win Turing Prize for technique that made possible AlphaGo's chess triumph

Some of the flashiest achievements in artificial intelligence in the past decade have come from a technique by which the computer acts randomly from a set of choices and is rewarded or punished for each correct or wrong move. It's the technique most famously employed in AlphaZero, Google DeepMind's 2016 program that achieved mastery at the games of chess, shogi, and Go in 2018. The same approach helped the AlphaStar program achieve "grandmaster" play in the video game Starcraft II. On Wednesday, two AI scholars were rewarded for advancing so-called reinforcement learning, a very broad approach to how a computer proceeds in an unknown environment. Andrew G. Barto, professor emeritus in the Department of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Richard S. Sutton, professor of computer science at the University of Alberta, Canada, were jointly awarded the 2025 Turing Award by the Association for Computing Machinery.