14 DAY TRIAL // Google is pumping up some more money into the A.M. Turing Award, which is often compared to the Nobel prize, with the difference that this one is offered in computer science. The score will go from $250,000 (€201,000) up to $1 million (€804,000).
The Association for Computing Machinery made the announcement, saying that thanks to Google, the prize money would be quadrupling.
“The cash award, which goes into effect for the 2014 ACM Turing Award to be announced early next year, reflects the escalating impact of computing on daily life through the innovations and technologies it enables. The new level is also intended to raise the Turing Award's visibility as the premier recognition of computer scientists and engineers who have made contributions of lasting and major technical importance to the computing field,” the announcement reads.
Computing is an increasingly important ingredient in all fields, be they medical or financial, and computer science courses have become some of the most popular out there. Considering just how Silicon Valley is doing from a financial standpoint, it’s not really a big surprise that there’s such a high interest in this domain.
The Turing Award celebrates the deeper side of computing, and it’s usually awarded to those who are considered to be true pioneers, fundamental contributors to everything that makes computing. Those who win the prize aren’t exactly famous and they didn’t go on to make billions, but they made important headway into software and hardware design, helped build computers, the Internet, online commerce, social networks and so on.
For the brightest minds in computer science
The ACM Turing Award was created in 1966 and has since honored the computer scientists and engineers who created the systems and underlying theoretical foundations that have propelled the information technology industry.
The award bears the name of Alan Turing, British mathematician who laid the foundation for today’s interconnected world. He envisioned the famous Turing machine, one that had the power of the thinking machine. Many have since tried to create such a machine, but few have succeeded into making any headway.
Google’s DeepMind, an Artificial Intelligence company that was acquired earlier this year, is actually one of those who managed to register some success. DeepMind unveiled that it has built a neural network that can access an external memory. It can learn to copy sequences of up to length 120 with near perfection, which is considerably more than the maximum 20 that was previously achieved.
