Two trailblazing computer scientists have won the 2024 Turing Award for their work in reinforcement learning, a discipline in which machines learn through a reward-based trial-and-error approach that lets them adapt within constrained or dynamic environments.

Having machines learn from experience was once considered a dead end. It’s now critical to artificial intelligence, and work in the field has won two men the highest honor in computer science.

This year's Turing Award — often called the Nobel Prize of computer science — is going to Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton, the pioneers of a key approach that underlies much of today's artificial intelligence.