Google Money Quadruples Top Computing Prize to $1-Million

The cash award for the highest honor in computer science, the A.M. Turing Award, will rise from $250,000 to $1-million with funding from Google, writes The New York Times. The increase brings the value of the award presented annually by the Association for Computing Machinery into Nobel Prize territory.

The prize, inaugurated in 1966, is named for Alan Turning, the British World War II code breaker considered the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence. Google, which has co-funded the $250,000 award since 2007 with Intel, decided to up the ante after the latter tech firm dropped out. Stuart Feldman, vice president for engineering at Google, said the company aims to lift the Turing Award into the “major league of scientific prizes.”