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Richard S. Sutton
Computer scientist

Richard S. Sutton

Famoose for

Developing the foundations of reinforcement learning.

Temporal-difference learning · The Bitter Lesson

Born
Unknown
Birthplace
Toledo, Ohio, United States

More people

Ada LovelaceRecognising what a programmable machine could do beyond arithmetic.Alan TuringHelping break Enigma and laying foundations for computer science.Grace HopperHelping make computer programming readable in English-like language.

Richard S. Sutton

Richard Sutton is a computer scientist whose work studies how agents learn through interaction and reward. He shared the 2024 Turing Award with Andrew Barto.

Early life

Education

Studied psychology at Stanford before graduate computer-science work at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Career

  1. 1984

    Doctorate

    Completed research supervised by Andrew Barto.

  2. 1985–1994

    Industry research

    Worked at GTE Laboratories.

  3. 2003

    Alberta

    Joined the University of Alberta.

Contributions

Temporal-difference learning

Developed methods for learning predictions from experience.

The Bitter Lesson

Argued for the long-term importance of general methods and computation.

Beyond work

Intellectual influences

Harry Klopf’s ideas about trial-and-error learning helped direct his research interests.

Sources & photo creditBiography and career ↗Biographical references ↗

Original photograph. Cropped and displayed in monochrome.

Photo: Xuthoria. CC BY-SA 4.0 · Original image. Cropped and displayed in monochrome.