'Nobel Prize' of computing gets $1M from Google

Google has just quadrupled the prize money—to $1 million—for the computing "Nobel Prize."

Until the announcement Thursday, the Association for Computing Machinery's prestigious Turing Award offered winners just $250,000, sponsored in recent years by Google and Intel.

"The Turing Award is now funded at the monetary level of the world's most prestigious cultural and scientific awards and prizes," ACM President Alexander Wolf said in a release.

Previous winners have included Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson in 1983 for the creation of the Unix operating system.

Google's vice president of engineering, Stuart Feldman, said in the release that those at the tech giant "think it's important to recognize when people make fundamental contributions in computer science, and we want to help ACM raise awareness of these innovators and the contributions they've made to the world."

Named in memory of Alan Turing, the British mathematician featured in the newly released film "The Imitation Game," the award was created in 1966 "for major contributions of lasting importance to computing."

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The 2014 Turing Award will be presented next spring.