The computing equivalent of the Nobel prize has been handed to British scientist Leslie Valiant, who was commended for his inspirational work over the past 30 years.
The Turing Award, named after the legendary Alan Turing, has been honouring excellence in computer science since 1966.
Google and Intel now fund the Turing Award and $250,000 (156,000) of their money will be handed to Valiant in recognition of his achievements.
"His work has opened new frontiers, introduced ingenious new concepts, and presented results of great originality, depth and beauty," the prize's organisers said of Valiant.
"Time and again, Valiant's work has literally defined or transformed the computer science research landscape."
Valiant, a professor of computer science and applied mathematics at Harvard University, has been a major player in developing ideas surrounding some of today's cutting-edge technology.
He has been a major influence on artificial intelligence, natural language processing and handwriting recognition, amongst numerous other innovations.
One particular paper, entitled A theory of the learnable,' made a huge impact on computational learning theory.
In the paper, Valiant proposed his "probably approximately correct" (PAC) model, which would help minimise generalisation errors in learning algorithms.
The phrase "probably approximately correct" suggested that with high probability, hypotheses made by a learning algorithm should should be "approximately correct."
With the PAC model, the learning algorithm could on rare occasions be unable to learn from training data, meaning it could put out a poor hypothesis. But most of the time, the hypothesis should have decent accuracy on data it will encounter in the future.
"In hindsight, PAC learning seems almost obvious, and part of the beauty of Valiant's work is how perfectly it reflects our intuitions about the learning process," organisers said.
PAC "has become an essential framework for the theory of learning," the organisers said.
In other Turing news, the famous mathematician's papers are to be kept in England, after a last minute donation from the National Heritage Memorial Fund.
