The Turing Award goes to deep learning

The Association for Computing Machinery announced on 27 March 2019 that the 2018 Turing Award, and its million-dollar prize, would go to Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun for "conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that have made deep neural networks a critical component of computing". The three had worked on neural networks through the years when the mainstream regarded the subject as a dead end, had been funded through the second winter largely by a Canadian programme for unfashionable research, and had, since 2012, watched their methods take over the field.

The citation named the specific contributions: Hinton's backpropagation, Boltzmann machines and the 2012 ImageNet result; LeCun's convolutional networks and the LeNet line; Bengio's neural language models, attention and generative adversarial networks. Between them the citation covers roughly half the events on this timeline after 1985.

The award was recognition, and it was also an ending. The argument the three had been having with the field since Perceptrons was over. In 2024 two of them, Hinton and Hopfield, would receive the Nobel Prize in Physics, and the argument would move outside the field, to whether the thing they had built could be controlled.