Three Pioneers in Artificial Intelligence Win Turing Award

An anonymous reader shares a report: In 2004, Geoffrey Hinton doubled down on his pursuit of a technological idea called a neural network. It was a way for machines to see the world around them, recognize sounds and even understand natural language. But scientists had spent more than 50 years working on the concept of neural networks, and machines couldn't really do any of that. Backed by the Canadian government, Dr. Hinton, a computer science professor at the University of Toronto, organized a new research community with several academics who also tackled the concept. They included Yann LeCun, a professor at New York University, and Yoshua Bengio at the University of Montreal.

On Wednesday, the Association for Computing Machinery, the world's largest society of computing professionals, announced that Drs. Hinton, LeCun and Bengio had won this year's Turing Award for their work on neural networks. The Turing Award, which was introduced in 1966, is often called the Nobel Prize of computing, and it includes a $1 million prize, which the three scientists will share. More: The Godfathers of the AI Boom Win Computing's Highest Honor; Hinton Says We Need To Start Over; Bengio is Worried About Its Future; and Deep Learning May Need a New Programming Language That's More Flexible Than Python, LeCun Says.

Well that's demeaning.

[Gravis Zero]

Honestly, these eggheads deserve more than just an award for having passed Turing Test. Scientists are real people too (and they have the Turing Awards to prove it)! ;)

Re:

[charlie merritt]

>> deserve more than *just* an award

How about 1/3 Million each AND a few bragging rights?

Re: Well that's demeaning.

[Type44Q]

whoosh...

Re:

[cascadingstylesheet]

Honestly, these eggheads deserve more than just an award for having passed Turing Test. Scientists are real people too (and they have the Turing Awards to prove it)! ;)

To be fair, we don't know if they passed it, just their creations ;)

As per an archived comment from 2017:

[Rick Schumann]

We do need to stop referring to this stuff as 'Artificial Intelligence', because it isn't. 'Neural Networks', 'Deep Learning Algorithms', and so on, are not really 'intellgence' at all, they're just clever programming. Ambitious marketing people the news media, TV, and movies, they've all got people believing these things are actually human-level intelligent when they're clearly and objectively not, none of these pieces of software can 'think', they're not 'conscious', they don't really make 'decisions', no

Re:

[Rick Schumann]

They do them poorly and they'll keep doing them poorly because what they've produced is a evolutionary cul-de-sac. Wrong approach! You're fundamentally wrong.

Re:

[BlackOverflow]

Stuff like translating language and driving cars are just following a set of rules, which machines/computers are really good at. But things like understanding the underlying meaning of language, or that the car needs to follow the directions of a cop who is directing traffic are much harder for them. That is the line between just following rules and actual intelligence.

Re:

[Rick Schumann]

'Driving a car' is NOT just following a set of rules unless you like disasters! In the Real World unforseen things happen all the time and the current crop of computer software just isn't up to it because all it *can* do is 'follow rules'; it needs to know when to *break* the rules for safety reasons, and you need an actual *mind* to do that.

Re:

[Rick Schumann]

You can't program a computer to make a JUDGEMENT CALL as to when to BREAK A RULE, you idiot, it requires a SENTIENT MIND!

Lisp bigot patient zero

[epine]

The Spirit of Unlimited Possibilities [edge.org] — 15 March 2019

In which John Brockman says "I was there, Gandalf."

Among the reasons we don't hear much about cybernetics today, two are central: First, although The Human Use of Human Beings was considered an important book in its time, it ran counter to the aspirations of many of Wiener's colleagues, including John von Neumann and Claude Shannon, who were interested in the commercialization of the new technologies. Second, computer pioneer John McCarthy disliked

2004?

[Anonymous Coward]

2004? Hinton was doing this stuff WAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYYY before 2004; more like the 80s. LeCun also, back to the 90s at least.

I'll be impressed

[Chris Mattern]

when the AI wins the Turing Award. I imagine it'll need to pass the Turing Test first.

Nice post

[rowleydaisy]

Great post students!