Richard S. Sutton

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Invented temporal-difference learning and co-wrote Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction, the textbook the whole field learned from and which is free online. His 2019 essay “The Bitter Lesson” — that general methods plus compute beat handcrafted human knowledge — has become the most-cited two pages in modern AI. Shared the 2024 Turing Award.

Curator’s note

Wrote the shortest, most annoying, most consistently vindicated thing in AI.

Portrait

Painted from a photograph of Richard S. Sutton by Numenta, licensed CC BY 3.0.

Sources

• 01Richard S. Sutton en.wikipedia.org
• 02Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction incompleteideas.net
• 03The Bitter Lesson (2019) incompleteideas.net