Richard Sutton

Richard S. Sutton is a Canadian computer scientist and pioneer of modern computational reinforcement learning. He is a professor of computing science at the University of Alberta, Chief Scientific Advisor at the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii), and a research scientist at Keen Technologies. He is best known for his foundational contributions to reinforcement learning, including temporal-difference learning and policy gradient methods, and for his 2019 essay "The Bitter Lesson," which argues that general computational methods that scale with computation outperform domain-specific approaches in the long run. He received the 2024 ACM A.M. Turing Award jointly with Andrew Barto for developing the conceptual and algorithmic foundations of reinforcement learning.