Richard S. Sutton
Canadian-American scientist who founded modern reinforcement learning
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- Paper, Book
- Honours
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- Most recent 2024
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Richard Sutton is a computer scientist at the University of Alberta who, with Andrew Barto, founded modern reinforcement learning. He invented temporal-difference learning, co-wrote the field’s standard textbook and shared the 2024 Turing Award. His essay “The Bitter Lesson” is widely discussed in AI.
Biography
Education
Sutton studied psychology at Stanford and earned his PhD in computer science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1984 under Andrew Barto.
Temporal-difference learning
In 1988 he published temporal-difference (TD) learning, a way for an agent to learn predictions from the difference between successive guesses. TD learning powered TD-Gammon, an early world-class backgammon program, and underlies modern methods such as Q-learning and deep RL.
Career
Sutton worked at GTE Laboratories and AT&T Labs before joining the University of Alberta in 2003, where he helped make Edmonton a centre of AI research. He was a distinguished research scientist at DeepMind and co-founded the Openmind Research Institute.
The Bitter Lesson
In his 2019 essay “The Bitter Lesson” he argued that AI methods that scale with computation, such as search and learning, eventually beat approaches built on human knowledge. He shared the 2024 Turing Award with Barto.
Timeline
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1984
PhD from UMass Amherst
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1988
Temporal-difference learning paper
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1998
Textbook with Andrew Barto
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2003
Joins the University of Alberta
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2017
Joins DeepMind Alberta
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2019
The Bitter Lesson
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2025
Turing Award announced
Notable works
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1988
Learning to Predict by the Methods of Temporal Differences Paper
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1998
Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction Book
With Andrew Barto.
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2019
The Bitter Lesson Essay
Awards and honours
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Fellow of the Royal Society
2021
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Turing Award
2024
Did you know?
-
1
He became a Canadian citizen and lives in Alberta.
-
2
His undergraduate degree was in psychology.
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3
His essay is only about one page long.
Connections
Frequently asked
Who is Richard S. Sutton?
Richard Sutton is a computer scientist at the University of Alberta who, with Andrew Barto, founded modern reinforcement learning. He invented temporal-difference learning, co-wrote the field’s standard textbook and shared the 2024 Turing Award. His essay “The Bitter Lesson” is widely discussed in AI.
Where is Richard S. Sutton from?
Richard S. Sutton was born in Ohio, United States.
What is Richard S. Sutton known for?
Richard S. Sutton is best known for Temporal-difference learning; reinforcement learning; “The Bitter Lesson”; Turing Award 2024.
What awards has Richard S. Sutton received?
Notable honours include Fellow of the Royal Society (2021), Turing Award (2024).
References
- Richard S. Sutton — Wikipedia. Wikipedia. Retrieved 4 November 2026.
- Official website. richsutton.com. Retrieved 4 November 2026.
- Richard S. Sutton (Q7328833) — structured data. Wikidata. Retrieved 4 November 2026.
Includes material from the Wikipedia article “Richard S. Sutton”, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. That text is available under the same licence. Learn more
External links
About this profile
- Researched by the TrackFame editorial team; reviewed by Sanjay Sokal under our editorial policy
- First published 4 November 2026
- Last updated
Cite this page
“Richard S. Sutton.” TrackFame, last updated 5 November 2026. https://trackfame.com/person/richard-s-sutton
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