Turing Award
In plain wordsNicknamed the 'Nobel Prize of computing', the top honor in computer science, awarded each year since 1966 by the Association for Computing Machinery. Several AI pioneers have received it.
Computing's highest honor, presented each year since 1966 by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and named after Alan TuringAlan Turing, prop. n.: A British mathematician who worked out what computers can do in principle, helped break German codes in the Second World War, and proposed the best-known test of machine intelligence.; ACM's criterion is technical work of major and enduring significance to the field, and since 2014 the award has carried US$1 million. Recipients honored for work in artificial intelligence include Marvin MinskyMarvin Minsky, prop. n.: An American AI pioneer who helped launch the field and MIT's AI laboratory, co-wrote a famous critique of early neural networks, and pictured the mind as a society of many simple parts. (1969), John McCarthyJohn McCarthy, prop. n.: The American computer scientist who coined the term 'artificial intelligence', invented the Lisp programming language and championed formal logic as the route to machine common sense. (1971), Allen NewellAllen Newell, prop. n.: An American computer scientist who, with Herbert Simon, wrote early AI programs that solved problems the way people do, and who sought a single theory of how the mind works. and Herbert A. SimonHerbert A. Simon, prop. n.: An American scientist of decision-making who, with Allen Newell, wrote some of the first AI programs and argued that minds and computers both think by manipulating symbols. (1975), Edward FeigenbaumEdward Feigenbaum, prop. n.: An American computer scientist who pioneered expert systems, programs that capture specialists' knowledge as rules to solve problems in fields such as chemistry and medicine. and Raj Reddy (1994), Leslie Valiant (2010), Judea PearlJudea Pearl, prop. n.: An Israeli-American computer scientist who gave AI the mathematics for reasoning under uncertainty and, later, for telling cause and effect apart from mere correlation. (2011), Geoffrey HintonGeoffrey Hinton, prop. n.: A British-Canadian scientist whose decades of persistent work on brain-inspired neural networks laid the foundations of modern AI; often called a 'godfather of AI', he now warns publicly about its dangers., Yann LeCunYann LeCun, prop. n.: A French-American computer scientist who pioneered the neural networks that recognize images, led Meta's AI research for over a decade, and argues that chatbots alone will not reach human-level AI. and Yoshua BengioYoshua Bengio, prop. n.: A Canadian computer scientist who helped found deep learning, including ideas behind today's language models, and who has become a leading voice on the risks of advanced AI. (2018, for deep neural networks), and Andrew BartoAndrew Barto, prop. n.: An American computer scientist who, with his student Richard Sutton, laid the foundations of reinforcement learning, the study of how machines learn by trial and error from rewards. and Richard SuttonRichard Sutton, prop. n.: A Canadian computer scientist who, with Andrew Barto, laid the groundwork for teaching machines by trial, error and reward, and whose essay 'The Bitter Lesson' argues that methods that scale with computing power always win. (2024, for reinforcement learningreinforcement learning, n.: A way of teaching a computer program by trial and error: it tries actions, earns points for good results and penalties for bad ones, and gradually learns which choices pay off over time.). The award year names the year honored and is announced the following spring, so the deep-learning award was announced in March 2019 and the reinforcement-learning award in March 2025.
The 2018 Turing Award confirmed that deep learning had entered computing's mainstream.
Origin
Established by the ACM in 1966; the first recipient was Alan Perlis, for work on programming languages and compilers. The nickname 'Nobel Prize of computing' reflects the absence of a Nobel category for computer science.
Usage note
Not to be confused with the Turing testTuring test, n.: Alan Turing's proposed test of machine intelligence: a judge holds typed conversations with a hidden person and a hidden computer, and the computer passes if the judge cannot consistently pick it out.. AI research was also recognized by the 2024 Nobel Prizes for AINobel Prizes for AI, phr.: The two 2024 Nobel Prizes, in physics and chemistry, that honored artificial intelligence research for the first time, recognizing neural-network pioneers and the protein-structure system AlphaFold..
Related
- godfathers of AIgodfathers of AI, phr.: A media nickname for three scientists — Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun — whose decades of work on neural networks underpins modern AI. They shared computing's top prize in 2019.
- Nobel Prizes for AINobel Prizes for AI, phr.: The two 2024 Nobel Prizes, in physics and chemistry, that honored artificial intelligence research for the first time, recognizing neural-network pioneers and the protein-structure system AlphaFold.
- Alan TuringAlan Turing, prop. n.: A British mathematician who worked out what computers can do in principle, helped break German codes in the Second World War, and proposed the best-known test of machine intelligence.
- deep learning revolutiondeep learning revolution, n.: The rapid takeover of AI by many-layered neural networks from about 2012, when they suddenly began beating older methods at recognizing images and speech, leading to today's AI systems.
- the bitter lessonthe bitter lesson, phr.: The argument, made by AI pioneer Rich Sutton in 2019, that AI has advanced mostly through general methods that use ever more computing power, not by programming in human knowledge.
- Turing testTuring test, n.: Alan Turing's proposed test of machine intelligence: a judge holds typed conversations with a hidden person and a hidden computer, and the computer passes if the judge cannot consistently pick it out.
Mentioned in
Alan TuringAlan Turing, prop. n.: A British mathematician who worked out what computers can do in principle, helped break German codes in the Second World War, and proposed the best-known test of machine intelligence., Geoffrey HintonGeoffrey Hinton, prop. n.: A British-Canadian scientist whose decades of persistent work on brain-inspired neural networks laid the foundations of modern AI; often called a 'godfather of AI', he now warns publicly about its dangers., Yann LeCunYann LeCun, prop. n.: A French-American computer scientist who pioneered the neural networks that recognize images, led Meta's AI research for over a decade, and argues that chatbots alone will not reach human-level AI., Allen NewellAllen Newell, prop. n.: An American computer scientist who, with Herbert Simon, wrote early AI programs that solved problems the way people do, and who sought a single theory of how the mind works., deep learning revolutiondeep learning revolution, n.: The rapid takeover of AI by many-layered neural networks from about 2012, when they suddenly began beating older methods at recognizing images and speech, leading to today's AI systems., Edward FeigenbaumEdward Feigenbaum, prop. n.: An American computer scientist who pioneered expert systems, programs that capture specialists' knowledge as rules to solve problems in fields such as chemistry and medicine., godfathers of AIgodfathers of AI, phr.: A media nickname for three scientists — Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun — whose decades of work on neural networks underpins modern AI. They shared computing's top prize in 2019., Herbert A. SimonHerbert A. Simon, prop. n.: An American scientist of decision-making who, with Allen Newell, wrote some of the first AI programs and argued that minds and computers both think by manipulating symbols., John McCarthyJohn McCarthy, prop. n.: The American computer scientist who coined the term 'artificial intelligence', invented the Lisp programming language and championed formal logic as the route to machine common sense., Judea PearlJudea Pearl, prop. n.: An Israeli-American computer scientist who gave AI the mathematics for reasoning under uncertainty and, later, for telling cause and effect apart from mere correlation., Jürgen SchmidhuberJürgen Schmidhuber, prop. n.: A German computer scientist who co-invented the LSTM, a neural network with memory that powered much of speech recognition and translation in the 2010s, and who argues that early pioneers go under-credited., Marvin MinskyMarvin Minsky, prop. n.: An American AI pioneer who helped launch the field and MIT's AI laboratory, co-wrote a famous critique of early neural networks, and pictured the mind as a society of many simple parts., Nobel Prizes for AINobel Prizes for AI, phr.: The two 2024 Nobel Prizes, in physics and chemistry, that honored artificial intelligence research for the first time, recognizing neural-network pioneers and the protein-structure system AlphaFold., Richard SuttonRichard Sutton, prop. n.: A Canadian computer scientist who, with Andrew Barto, laid the groundwork for teaching machines by trial, error and reward, and whose essay 'The Bitter Lesson' argues that methods that scale with computing power always win., the bitter lessonthe bitter lesson, phr.: The argument, made by AI pioneer Rich Sutton in 2019, that AI has advanced mostly through general methods that use ever more computing power, not by programming in human knowledge., Yoshua BengioYoshua Bengio, prop. n.: A Canadian computer scientist who helped found deep learning, including ideas behind today's language models, and who has become a leading voice on the risks of advanced AI., Andrew BartoAndrew Barto, prop. n.: An American computer scientist who, with his student Richard Sutton, laid the foundations of reinforcement learning, the study of how machines learn by trial and error from rewards., Leslie ValiantLeslie Valiant, prop. n.: A British computer scientist who in 1984 gave the first rigorous definition of what it means for a computer to learn from examples, founding the theory of machine learning., Raj ReddyRaj Reddy, prop. n.: An Indian-American computer scientist who pioneered computer speech recognition and large AI systems at Carnegie Mellon University, and shared the 1994 Turing Award.