Slashdot Mirror
Leslie Valiant Wins 'Nobel Prize' of Computing
autospa writes "ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery today named Leslie G. Valiant of Harvard University the winner of the 2010 ACM A.M. Turing Award for his fundamental contributions to the development of computational learning theory and to the broader theory of computer science. Valiant brought together machine learning and computational complexity, leading to advances in artificial intelligence as well as computing practices such as natural language processing, handwriting recognition, and computer vision. He also launched several subfields of theoretical computer science, and developed models for parallel computing. The Turing Award, widely considered the 'Nobel Prize in Computing,' is named for the British mathematician Alan M. Turing. The award carries a $250,000 prize, with financial support provided by Intel Corporation and Google Inc."
No, it is not a "Nobel Prize" but as even the wiki article on it says:
The Turing Award is recognized as the "highest distinction in Computer science"[2] and "Nobel Prize of computing".[3]
Now that citation 3 is to an article on ACM.org that also says:
Widely known as the 'Nobel Prize' of computing, the Turing Award recognizes individuals for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to the computing field.
So basically no one is conflating anything because it is widely known by that moniker.