If a Nobel Prize in informatics existed, who should have received it this year?
From the algorithms side, strong contenders in my opinion would be the authors of the new single-source shortest paths algorithms (https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.17033 ), as it improved the very well known algorithm from over 60 years ago, but perhaps a bigger breakthrough occurred somewhere in the AI space?
didn't see the ')' in the link,
I think it should be removed?
')' should not be there at the end
But Turing Award exists! Much like Fields Medal, most of the areas that were not covered by Nobels prize have by now introduced an award similar in caliber.
And last Turing Award was indeed given for the breakthrough work in reinforcement learning (first papers date back to 1980-s)
If I had to bet on the 2026 Turing Award, I think it could go to Peter Shor for quantum computing. However, if the Nobel Prize for informatics is instead a separate prize for paper of the year, I think it would be awarded for AlphaEvolve or maybe the DeepSeek-R1 or Kimi-1.5 papers (although OpenAI did something similar in 2024 but didn't publish the details). However, I don't think awarding the prize to a single person in AI would be fair, since these papers have hundreds of authors, most papers are closed source, there have been many small breakthroughs rather than one foundational paper, and moreover, Geoffrey Hinton has already won the Turing Award and Nobel prize in Physics and also last year's Turing award was for Reinforcement Learning (RL had a bigger theoretical framework than LLMs).
So maybe after all the shortest path paper would have a chance for the hypothetical Nobel in informatics.