Rich Sutton

Rich Sutton (Richard S. Sutton) is a computer scientist and professor at the University of Alberta in Canada who helped lay the foundations of reinforcement learning. He developed core methods such as temporal-difference learning and co-wrote the textbook Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction with Andrew Barto.

He and Barto received the 2024 Turing Award for their contributions to reinforcement learning. His 2019 essay The Bitter Lesson, which argues that general methods that scale with computation eventually outperform approaches built on human knowledge, is widely cited.

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