Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]

https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2024/09/advanced-physicsprize2024.pdf

by drpossum • 2 years ago

943 783 2 years ago

nobelprize.org

jeffwass• 2 years ago

As a former physicist (PhD in Experimental condensed matter physics), I have to ask WTF?

I get the importance of AI development, but Physics?

tmelm• 2 years ago

I'm equally as confused; huge WTF moment. Seems like a paradigm breakthrough, in that Nobel Prizes can be given for discoveries in tangential fields. Or perhaps it's due to Dr. Hopfields physicist status, that all his discoveries are considered physics related? Or that NNs are considered a part of physics / nature?

Alifatisk• 2 years ago

Yeah I was wondering the same, I get that this was fundamental work, but how was this strongly tied to physics?

tempusalaria• 2 years ago

What bizarre choice. Hinton’s work has nothing to do with physics.

Nobel prize jumping on the bandwagon, just like they did for mRNA after covid. At least that was related to medicine.

The first 2 paragraphs of the linked pdf read like a joke. Like it’s a parody announcement.

jampekka7• 2 years ago

Hinton did introduce the Boltzmann machine networks that kind of resemble thermodynamics if you squint really hard. And those didn't really pan out.

Of course the price is really for MLP backpropagation (or how it found applications) but I guess it's not physics enough.

Hopfield networks never really found use either, but they are sort of related to Ising models and NNs, so I guess it's physics then.

kgwgk3• 2 years ago

At least they already recognized actual spin-glasses research in physics in 2021. That makes this award for this by-product more puzzling though.

karmasimida• 2 years ago

Boltzmann machine does quote physics as its inspiration, they didn't award him for his work in BP and stuff.

But I agree, this feels like a stretch.

adastra222• 2 years ago

Or Obama’s peace prize.

manquer2• 2 years ago

It is different for Peace prize , it has always been political and different from day one , it is awarded by Norwegian noble committee which is appointed by the Norwegian parliament.

All other prizes are awarded in Sweden by Swedish academy(for literature) , Royal Swedish Academy for sciences (physics and chemistry) , karolinska institute (physiology) are all professionally established organizations at the time of Nobel’s death with other activities professional organizations do.

Norwegian Nobel committee while in theory independent is just people appointed by the parliament with no need to have professional standing in their field on which they are supposed to award the prize in and it always shows .

Obama’s prize is hardly the first egregious one or even the most outrageous Henry Kissinger got one .

So it kind of matters on the changed standards in swedish technical ones while peace has been disaster for half century or more , with non transparent process selected by ex- MPs

BeetleB• 2 years ago

Hinton’s work has nothing to do with physics.

Nor did Jack Kilby's invention of the IC, but they still gave it to him.

You could probably argue the same for the invention of the transistor...

hermitcrab2• 2 years ago

I agree. I don't see how this is physics in any accepted sense of the word.

quaxi2• 2 years ago

When Alfred Nobel wrote his will in 1895, there was no computer science or information theory.

One could argue it's closer to mathematics than physics, but if you'd say to him that someone made sand think like a human he might even put it under the medicine category.

jeanlucas• 2 years ago

Awesome.

They trained artificial neural networks using physics

Here's from Nobel Prize official website: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2024/press-release...

drpossum10• 2 years ago

I don't know if this is a travesty that they awarded the prize to work on non-physical systems to jump on a bandwagon or that there was nothing else obvious enough to the board in actual physics to give this to.

If I was the awardee I'd consider declining just out of respect to the field.

jgrahamc• 2 years ago

The linked document connects their work to physics as follows:

"The Hopfeld network utilises physics that describes a material’s characteristics due to its atomic spin – a property that makes each atom a tiny magnet. The network as a whole is described in a manner equivalent to the energy in the spin system found in physics, and is trained by fnding values for the connections between the nodes so that the saved images have low energy"

"Hinton used tools from statistical physics, the science of systems built from many similar components."

drpossum10• 2 years ago

Then it should be awarded for the result.

Given the line of reasoning this has now opened up Alan Turing should be awarded one posthumously in every field.

jampekka7• 2 years ago

Neither of these models were never really influential though beyond some theoretical niches.

wslh2• 2 years ago

It seems like a hallucination generated from a ChatGPT prompt...

aquafox2• 2 years ago

"This year’s laureates used tools from physics to construct methods that helped lay the foundation for today’s powerful machine learning."

Does this mean if I'd use a deep understanding of birds to design way more aerodynamic airplanes, I could get the Nobel prize in physiology/medicine? Don't get me wrong, their work is probably prize worthy, but shouldn't the Nobel prize in physics be awarded for discoveries in the _physical world_?

vasco5• 2 years ago

Everything in the universe is a tool from physics - taps head smugly.

rurban• 2 years ago

Everything is either mathemetics or stamp-collecting (ie social sciences).

Physics and chemistry are just applications of mathematics.

mglz• 2 years ago

Hm, they have to fit them into Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature, or Peace. I guess physics is the closest they can get without a gross missplacement? (Although you might be able to absue literature for LLMs?)

mjburgess3• 2 years ago

They dont have to give them a nobel prize. They have not advanced any of those areas.

raincole3• 2 years ago

It's definitely not how "they" work. It's not like a committee choosing an achievement across all the fields and then trying to put it into one of the 5 buckets.

We have Turning Award, Fields Award and the other thousands of awards for achievements that can't be categorized as Physics/Biology/Economics/Chemistry.

quantum_state2• 2 years ago

The Turing Prize is for contribution in computing ... History would show this is not a good choice or taste of the Nobel Physics Committee ...

kelahcim• 2 years ago

Kahneman was awarded Nobel prize in economic sciences even though his work was, in fact, all about psychology.

dosshell• 2 years ago

Note that: There are no economic science Nobel prize.

Only one similar named price in the name and memory of Alfred Nobel, which some how, is allowed to be part of the Nobel prize celebration.

I guess my opinion is in minority, but i don't like that another prize hijacks the Nobel prize.

nabla95• 2 years ago

Boltzmann machines and associative memories originate in physics.

okintheory2• 2 years ago

But, the starting point of Neural Networks in the ML/AI sense, is cybernetics + Rosenblatt's perceptron, research done mathematicians (who became early computer scientists)

seydor6• 2 years ago

I studied physics in the 90s and we had an NNs course, where most of the models were inspired by physics (MLPs was just one). NNs have been used since decades for identifying e.g. the trajectories of particles at CERN. I remember Hinton's work with Sejnowski (who probably should also be awarded). I was actually surprised to find out that Hinton was not a physicist by training

Obviously physicists take great interest in models of the brain or models of intelligence. All of physics is modeling , after all

drpossum10• 2 years ago

All of physics is modeling but not all modeling is physics.

weinzierl• 2 years ago

At least the somewhat free interpretation of field boundaries is nothing new. The physicist Rutherford ("All science is either Physics or stamp collecting")[1] won the Chemistry Nobel Prize.

Influence and consideration of the Zeitgeist is also nothing new. Einstein got his prize for the discovery of the Photoelectric Effect and not Relativity.

[1] I know that some people have interpreted this quote in favor of the other sciences but I think that is far fetched.

eleveriven2• 2 years ago

It highlights the evolving nature of scientific boundaries

evandrofisico2• 2 years ago

I IS a physics problem. Non physicists tend of think that the only areas being studied are high energy and/or cosmology, but modern physics covers a multitude of areas, including complex systems.

NotYourLawyer2• 2 years ago

Complex non-physics systems?

YeGoblynQueenne5• 2 years ago

Does that mean that computer scientists who do neural network research should be considered physicists? Do physics journals accept submissions on neural networks research under the same justification?

bjornsing4• 2 years ago

Does this mean if I'd use a deep understanding of birds to design way more aerodynamic airplanes, I could get the Nobel prize in physiology/medicine?

Yes I think it does. But those planes would have to create one hell of a buzz!

keybored• 2 years ago

Plato: man is a featherless biped

The Society for Birdology now has the pleasure of jointly awarding posthumously Plato and Diogenes with the Distinguished Birdologist Award. Their findings on human anatomy used insights from birdology at critical points. Well done, lads!

hoseja2• 2 years ago

Sweden Yes!

isaacfrond• 2 years ago

Physics Nobel prize now also covers computer science, I guess.

programjames4• 2 years ago

Meh, neuroscience.

what373736• 2 years ago

No relation to neuroscience whatsoever.

sega_sai2• 2 years ago

Physicist here. I'm sure Hinton deserves some sort of prize, but in Physics is really bizarre.

jampekka7• 2 years ago

He did get the Turing award already in 2018.

Ma8ee7• 2 years ago

I think this is the Royal Academy of Sciences way to admit that Physics as a research subject has ground to a halt. String theory suffocated theoretical high energy physics for nearly half a century with nothing to show for it, and a lot of other areas of fundamental physics are kind of done.

mppm5• 2 years ago

It really has not, though. There is more to physics than high-energy and cosmology, and there is no shortage of deserving contributions of smaller scope. It really is bizarre that deep learning would make it to the top of the list.

Ma8ee7• 2 years ago

Could you give me some examples of areas of fundamental physics that are vital and have done some significant discoveries lately? I genuinely would like to know, because I really can't think of any.

eigenket8• 2 years ago

I think this is (very) inaccurate. It feels more like them trying to jump on a "hot topic" bandwagon (machine learning/AI hype is huge).

Physics as a discipline hasn't really stalled at all. Fundamental physics arguably has, because no one really has any idea how to get close to making experimental tests that would distinguish the competing ideas. But even in fundamental physics there are cool developments like the stuff from Jonathan Oppenheim and collaborators in the last couple of years.

That said "physics" != "fundamental physics" and physics of composite systems ranging from correlated electron systems, and condensed matter through to galaxies and cosmology is very far from dead.

620gelato• 2 years ago

trying to jump on a "hot topic" bandwagon

I don't know exactly what they hope to gain by jumping on that bandwagon though; neither the physicists nor the computer scientists are going to value this at all. And dare I say, the general populace associated with the two fields isn't going to either - case in point, this hn post.

If there weren't any noble-worthy nominations for physics, maybe skip it? (Although that hasn't happened since 1972 across any field)

Ma8ee7• 2 years ago

I just briefly looked into what Jonathan Oppenheim is working on, and I’d say he’s part of the problem. More speculative work that might or might not be testable in a distant future.

noobermin3• 2 years ago

String theory and the foundations are not the only area of physics. It would be nice for theorists to remember that.

api• 2 years ago

My sense is that we might have reached the limits of what we can do in high-energy or fundamental physics without accessing energy levels or other extreme states that we currently can't access as they are beyond our capacity to generate.

From what I've read (not a professional physicist) string theory is not testable unless we can either examine a black hole or create particle accelerators the size of the Moon's orbit (at least). Many other proposed theories are similar.

There is some speculation that the hypothetical planet nine -- a 1-5 Earth mass planet predicted in the far outer solar system on the basis of the orbits of comets and Kuiper Belt / TNO objects -- could be a primordial black hole captured by the solar system. A black hole of that mass would be about the size of a marble to a golf ball, but would have 1-5g gravity at the distance of Earth's radius.

If such an object did exist it would be within space probe range, which would mean we could examine a black hole. That might get us un-stuck.

If we can't do something like that, maybe we should instead focus on other areas of physics that we can access and that have immense practical applications: superconductivity, condensed matter physics, plasmas / fusion, etc.

slashdave5• 2 years ago

Although rare, there are cosmic rays that do span very high energies. You can access these from, for example, atmospheric showers.

sampo• 2 years ago

My sense is that we might have reached the limits of what we can do in high-energy or fundamental physics without accessing energy levels or other extreme states that we currently can't access

How can we know, as past decades theoretical high-energy physics has studied made-up mathematical universes that don't tell much about our real universe. We haven't really given it that much of a try, yet.

aghilmort• 2 years ago

interesting - source(s) on Planet 9 black hole theory?

alwinaugustin2• 2 years ago

Even Sheldon Cooper stopped researching string theory at one point.

amai6• 2 years ago

Physics as a research subject has ground to a halt

Max Planck was told by his professor to not go into Physics because "almost everything is already discovered". Planck said he didn't want to discover anything, just learn the fundamentals.

Ma8ee7• 2 years ago

First, I didn't say that I thought everything already was discovered, but that the fundamental physics community doesn’t discover new things. That is due to how physics research is practiced today and has nothing to do with how much that is left to discover.

Second, even if it obviously wasn't true when Planck was told that almost everything is discovered, it doesn't say anything about the state today.

bmitc3• 2 years ago

Are people working on fundamentals these days? It seems to be a forgotten art, where everyone is working at the edge of something.

killerstorm• 2 years ago

What if the next breakthrough is complex and not directly accessible from our current state of math/physics thought?

I see no reasons to expect steady progress. Nobody knows how long it would take to prove Riemann hypothesis, for example.

bdjsiqoocwk• 2 years ago

May I ask, very humbly, what are you credentials when making that assessment?

mikaeluman2• 2 years ago

Partially agree. It also seems like a desperate way to connect themselves to "AI" and the hype.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK2• 2 years ago

Upon reading the Hopfield paper back in 1982, I concluded that it's not worth it to pursue a physics career, and more efficient to put the effort into AI research, as at some point the AI will solve all the remaining science problems in a couple of milliseconds. I might have erred by a few decades, but overall seems like we are on track.

pvitz• 2 years ago

Next year, the creators of Excel will get the prize, because it is an implementation of the mathematical universe.

passwordoops• 2 years ago

You know what, I can support this for its predecessor, Lotus123. If ANNs are worthy of the prize in physics, then so is this

jhbadger3• 2 years ago

VisiCalc, surely. Lotus 123, much like Excel, was just following in the footsteps of the original spreadsheet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisiCalc

incognition• 2 years ago

Vbasic is Turing complete hah

logicchains• 2 years ago

Imagine how Schmidhuber's feeling right now.

bobosha• 2 years ago

haha!

throwaway2562• 2 years ago

Alas, poor Jurgen! I knew him, Horatio. A fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy…

beautifulfreak• 2 years ago

reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%BCrgen_Schmidhuber#Credit...

versteegen2• 2 years ago

That was my almost immediate reaction to the headline! Rarely credited but rarely forgotten.

cubefox4• 2 years ago

I'm sure he writes an article pointing all the errors in the official justification for the prize.

sva_2• 2 years ago

Has anyone else won a Turing award as well as the Nobel prize in physics?

protoman3000• 2 years ago

This is not physics. Does that mean there was no Nobel Price worthy research happening in the field of physics?

Urahandystar• 2 years ago

[flagged]

vichle2• 2 years ago

Could you elaborate, which wars did he start? (honest question)

ulkram• 2 years ago

"He launched airstrikes or military raids in at least seven countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan."

https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-na-pol-obama-at-war/

crossroadsguy• 2 years ago

Tangential to your question but not the premise of this subthread/post - he became president in Feb 2009 and got the award in October.

I don't think he started any new wars, but he inherited some and continued. Anyway, the point here should be the absurdity of a lot of Nobel awards and that stands - especially in his case.

I mean Trump was nominated for the award for fuck's sake! More than 2 or 3 times iirc. So anyway.

simiones2• 2 years ago

In addition to the other replies, he is the only US president in modern history to explicitly authorize the assassination of a US citizen without a trial, and create a legal doctrine allowing future presidents to do so; and he was the major escalator of the use of drone strikes in war (the practice started with Bush, but it expanded many fold under Obama).

Arkhaine_kupo6• 2 years ago

This is such a tired reply. The peace prize is not part of the same group as the other awards, and a significant difference in the peace award is that intent is awarded not results.

The dude who invented the MAD doctrine did not get the award despite nuke deterrance doctrice being related to the least amount of wars in any century since WW2.

But his platform of deescalation and his plans for american foregin diplomacy were rewarded. He ultimately failed to reach those goals (specially with the escalation on Afghanistan and the emergence of groups like ISIS), but tbh the Iran agreement and the Pacific trade agreement, killed and buried by the next administration, would have created a massive buffer and solution for the 2 hotspots we currently experience around the middle east (where terrorism is largely sponsored by Iran) and the Taiwan takeover by the CCP (would also be partially neutralised by the Pacific trade talks).

He was naive, in the way the world was naive to the ability to sacrifice prosperity that some leaders are capable of. He underestimated how dumb and suicidal putin could be, he underestimated how much China would be willing to sacrifice in terms of potential, he underestimated how much violence was latent and capable in the middle east. but his nobel peace prize was due to his campaign running on nuclear proliferation treaties and closer relationships with the muslim world which had been entirely antagonistic since Bush

haunter• 2 years ago

This is such a tired reply. The peace prize is not part of the same group as the other awards

It’s called a Nobel prize and it was established by the will of Alfred Nobel. So yes it’s the same

vasco5• 2 years ago

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. The award shouldn't have been given for intentions, before he even did anything. We should not reward promises, but action. Even a long term member of the committee expressed regret in them giving it to Obama.

acoupleofts• 2 years ago

The least amount of wars in any century since WW2

js8• 2 years ago

The dude who invented the MAD doctrine did not get the award

No, he didn't win the award, because MAD doctrine (aside from it being immoral) doesn't actually work in the real world.

It's an idealized model based on game theory, which doesn't deal with pesky complexities such as irrationality, salami tactics, short-range CBMs, anti-missile defenses, tactical nukes and so on. (That's why many of these things used to be banned by treaties, to continue to pretend that MAD is actually required for peace. In reality many nations do not have nukes and live in peace.)

mardifoufs2• 2 years ago

He received it before any of that. And Libya does actually cancel every point you mention by the way. Because it's actually not hard to have presidents not start wars at all- both presidents since Obama did just that.

And if the real Nobel prize doesn't want the confusion around its name to happen... it should do something about it?

Der_Einzige3• 2 years ago

The amount of people who act like Obama is a war monger without understanding the situation he found himself in is shockingly high, especially on a website like this with its supposedly "educated" people.

Losing the TPP (Minus the IP parts)/Asia Pivot and the focus away from Nuclear Non Proliferation are terrifying. Obama is directly the reason why Myanmar had its democracy for as long as it did, and most people in South East Asia have not found anyone nearly as inspirational as him from America since 2016 and likely won't for awhile longer.

Obama was awesome, and his legacy has been unfairly malingered. He was not the "warmonger" president that revisionists like to portray him as.

hshshshsvsv• 2 years ago

That was the whole point of nobel prize in first place lol.

okintheory2• 2 years ago

Absolutely. This makes very little sense, IMO, and is a bad look for the committee, trying to claim 'physics' for something that clearly is not.

ginko2• 2 years ago

Looks like an award to increase the reputation of the Nobel prize.

If anything it stains the reputation of the Nobel prize to me. How seriously can you take the Nobel committee after this?

bogtog• 2 years ago

I wonder if this'll help physics PhDs get industry jobs (I hear Myron Scholes is up for the 2025 prize)

hellectronic• 2 years ago

You mean like the ones working on Wall Street?

vasco5• 2 years ago

If you google who Myron Scholes is you'll see the person you replied to made the same assertion already.

aquafox2• 2 years ago

"This year’s laureates used tools from physics to construct methods that helped lay the foundation for today’s powerful machine learning."

programjames4• 2 years ago

Don't get me wrong, their work is probably prize worthy

I would strongly disagree with you there. It's the exact same idea as the least squares approximation or conjugate gradient method: create an energy function from a quadratic and minimize it.

cfcf14• 2 years ago

So uh, things are not looking so good for actual physics these days, I gather?

sva_2• 2 years ago

Interesting thought. I hear some voices saying theoretical physics is stuck with string theory, but am not really qualified to make a judgement.

drpossum10• 2 years ago

Physics is not stuck in string theory as physics is not just high energy theoretical particle physics. There's also more going on in high energy theoretical particle physics than just "string theory".

rty32• 2 years ago

Nobel prize was awarded to theoretical work in 2021: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2021/popular-infor...

"theoretical physics" is such a big and ambiguous concept that physicists tend not to use the word in discussions. Thereotical work often involves a lot of numerical simulation on super computers these days which are kind of their own "experiments". And it is usually more productive to just mention the specific field, e.g. astronomy, condensed matter, AMO etc, and you can be sure there is always a lot of discoveries in each area.

oefrha4• 2 years ago

Former high energy theorist here: things are not looking so good for high energy physics (both theoretical and experimental) which loosely speaking accounted for maybe 1/3-1/2 of Nobel Prizes in the 20th century. That’s part of the reason I got out. I’m inclined to say astrophysics and cosmology, another pillar of the fundamental understanding of the universe, isn’t doing that well either, probably in the okayish but not as exciting as it used to be territory. I’m not qualified to talk about other fields.

dotnet003• 2 years ago

I think saying they're not looking good might be a bit of an exaggeration. Technological developments in both high energy physics and astrophysics stuff are in-between generations of technology right now, which is why things are a bit slower than usual.

With astrophysics, we're probably going to need the more sensitive gravitational wave detectors that are in development to become operational for new big breakthroughs. With high energy physics, many particle colliders and synchrotron light sources seem to be undergoing major upgrades these days. While particle colliders tend to get the spotlight in the public eye and are in a weird spot regarding the expected research outcomes, light sources are still doing pretty well afaik.

This Nobel I think is mainly because AI has overwhelmingly dominated the public's perception of scientific/technological progress this year.

nullindividual• 2 years ago

As a layman, the visualization of black holes, the superstructure above and below the Milky Way, JWST’s distant galaxy discoveries, gravitational wave detectors as mentioned, and some of the Kuiper Belt observations all seem to be interesting and exciting.

Oh and the death of string theory!

juanjmanfredi2• 2 years ago

What are you considering "high energy physics"? "1/3-1/2 of Nobel Prizes in the 20th century" is a significant overestimation unless you are including topics not traditionally included in high energy physics. For example, there were many Nobel prizes in nuclear physics, which shares various parallels with high energy physics in terms of historical origins, experimental techniques, and theoretical foundations. But nuclear physics is in a very exciting era of experimental and theoretical developments, so your "not looking so good" description does not apply.

optimalsolver• 2 years ago

Well I'm sure a $50 billion collider will fix things.

fnands2• 2 years ago

Please bro just one more collider. Just one more collider bro. I swear bro we're gonna fix physics forever. Just one more collider bro. We could go up or even underground. Please bro just one more collider.

ghrqan• 2 years ago

What an odd rationale. Please do not devalue the Physics Nobel Prize to the status of the Nobel Peace Prize.

This is overtly driven by expediency or business interests and ignores all societal problems.

Be happy that you get your billions for CERN and keep a low profile.

napa3uT2• 2 years ago

this is a painfully accurate description of how we feel we are treated(CERN physicists that is) are you an ex colleague or something :)

jwilk• 2 years ago

See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41775449 (> 40 comments).

kleiba2• 2 years ago

This must piss Schmidhuber off like nothing else.

raverbashing• 2 years ago

To the point of nuclear fusion even.

karmakurtisaani3• 2 years ago

A very long and detailed blog post incoming. Spoiler alert: the Nobel prize should have been awarded to Gödel/Hilbert (and Schmidhuber).

kleiba2• 2 years ago

Ironically, he is cited in this article.

karavelov• 2 years ago

Waiting for Sabine's comment: "Told you so, physics is dead"

varjag7• 2 years ago

Naturally she's not happy https://x.com/skdh/status/1843592351736050053

lucaslucasluke• 2 years ago

Could you copy and paste her post in here? I'm brazilian and our STF overlords have decided that we shall not access twitter anymore

noobermin3• 2 years ago

And the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics does not go to physics...

https://x.com/skdh/status/1843592351736050053

noobermin3• 2 years ago

May be I should know better, but is there no Nobel category for computer science or mathematics? This isn't physics, this is absolutely embarrassing. May be all those bitter elder physicists who didn't get a prize can feel a little justified in their derision of the institution.

drpossum10• 2 years ago

There no Nobel category for computer science or mathematics.

eigenket8• 2 years ago

Computer science has the Turing award and mathematics the Fields medal. Neither is exactly equivalent to the Nobel but they're similar levels of prestige.

The Nobel prize fields and criteria are a bit random, they're essentially just whatever Alfred Nobel wrote in his will.

dagw3• 2 years ago

they're similar levels of prestige

Within their respective fields, not in general. What makes the Nobel so unique and desirable is that everybody knows what it is and is impressed by it. Mentioning that you've won a Nobel prize will impress people and open doors in virtually any circumstance. Saying you have a Turing award will mostly lead to blank stares from anybody outside the field.

amai6• 2 years ago

How about a "Nobel Memorial Prize in Computer Sciences" similar to the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Econ...

etiam8• 2 years ago

Perhaps not a bad idea in that specific instance, but they're so embarrassed today about getting bought for the economics one that doing something similar again has become effectively out of the question (and on a balance I think that's for the best).

programjames4• 2 years ago

This is embarrassing. I would say Hopfield networks aren't even very revolutionary in neuroscience, but they're so old I can't tell. In terms of AI... they've been irrelevant for thirty years. I guess you could argue a transformer is a generalized Hopfield network, but of course that's a post-hoc understanding. None of this has anything to do with physics.

So what if an energy function lets you approximate the number of macro-states it can capture? Should every mathematics paper with Lagrange multipliers be put up for nomination? Every poll that uses the law of large numbers, and thus, entropy? Surely the computer scientists building the internet need to be included as well, since their work is based in information theory.

Or maybe, hear me out, we reserve the Nobel Prize in physics for advances in the physical sciences, understanding physical reality or how to bend it to our will.

seewhydee• 2 years ago

Had they wanted a good ML relevant physics Nobel, the committee had decades to award a prize to Marshall and Arianna Rosenbluth for the Markov Chain Monte Carlo method. Would have been self-evidently important and relevant to both physics and ML. Too late now -- Arianna died in 2020.

kenjackson• 2 years ago

Curious, would Peter Shor qualify? I struggle if his work is really just CS or enough physics to be in the discussion.

jampekka7• 2 years ago

There were some predictions that Peter Shor could win this year for quantum computation. I'd say his work is a lot closer to physics than Hinton's or Hopfield's.

jampekka7• 2 years ago

Neither Hopfield networks nor Restricted Boltzmann Machines/Deep Belief Networks really panned out for any purposes outside some theoretical niches.

The prize was awarded for "AI" and the tenous links to physics of some irrelevant models are just an excuse.

ants_everywhere• 2 years ago

I agree this is rather bizarre.

But let's not forget that the brain is a physical system and that neural networks are part of the reason we understand the brain as well as we do.

There was a long period where people like Chomsky thought the brain couldn't learn fast enough and that knowledge had to be innate.

kgwgk3• 2 years ago

neural networks are part of the reason we understand the brain as well as we do

We don’t understand much then.

coliveira• 2 years ago

The goal here is to attribute a very important area in contemporary technology to physicists. This prize advances physics in terms of giving it higher importance in the minds of lay people and journalists.

benrapscallion• 2 years ago

This is the only plausible reason:

“These artificial neural networks have been used to advance research across physics topics as diverse as particle physics, materials science, and astrophysics,” Ellen Moons, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said at a press conference this morning.

rvnx2• 2 years ago

Must be, because in the field of artificial intelligence, if these techniques are not in production and considered obsoletes it's for a good reason.

It may have been state-of-the-art in 1980s, but now is a bit late.

Very smart people in their time though.

In current times, a global prize to the transformers folks at least make more sense considering the context (despite it not being Physics).

jovial_cavalier2• 2 years ago

Many wrenches and powertools were essential in building the LHC, but they didn't give the prize to Black & Decker or DeWalt either.

jampekka7• 2 years ago

And medicine and literature and chemistry and war. Maybe they'll get all the prizes?

lr19703• 2 years ago

Honestly, I am stunned by today's Nobel committee announcement. Hinton's Boltzmann machine is a clever construct that nobody, repeat nobody, in the AI and ML is using anymore in actual practice.

EDIT: add minor clarification.

ks2048• 2 years ago

Next: Authors of "Attention is all you need" paper get Nobel Prize in Literature for writing one of the most read papers in past decade.

pavlov• 2 years ago

Bob Dylan already won that prize to similar controversy.

oefrha4• 2 years ago

Nobel Prize in Literature has always been controversial. It seems that the Physics Prize is headed that way (it’s not just this year)…

agomez314• 2 years ago

this is the best comment

hnfong5• 2 years ago

I think the Nobel Prize in Literature for "the most copied paper title" seems a better justification.

The first page of google for "Hopfield Networks" is "Hopfield Networks is all you need". No kidding...

RandomLensman• 2 years ago

Maybe just scrap the categories and have set or prizes for whatever sort of advanced humanity the most?

elashri4• 2 years ago

As a physicist, my reaction to this is how bizarre is that. Maybe he deserves a nobel prize but in physics?

Also arguing that NN is used in physics so we can argue nobel prize is okay is like asking for Stephan Wolfram to be awarded Nobel prize for Mathematica which is much more used in physics as a tool. And he is a physicist and had contributions to the field of numerical relativity (The reason he created Mathematica in the first place).

The royal science academy fucked up so much with this choice.

amelius• 2 years ago

It feels a bit like the field of physics claiming the invention of AI, where we all know that mathematics and/or CS deserve the honor.

alkonaut• 2 years ago

I think the Nobel prize doesn't want any scientific advance to fall outside the range of awards entirely.

meindnoch2• 2 years ago

where we all know that mathematics and/or CS deserve the honor

Or semiconductor manufacturers.

All the math and CS needed for AI can fit on a napkin, and had been known for 200+ years. It's the extreme scaling enabled by semiconductor science that really makes the difference.

cubefox4• 2 years ago

Someone changed the Wikipedia article today to call Hopfield a "physicist". Previously the article called him simply a scientist, because his main work wasn't limited to physics. I changed it back now, let's see if it holds up.

oefrha4• 2 years ago

The Nobel Committee doesn’t represent the field of physics. I talked to a few former colleagues (theoretical physicists) just now and every one of them found this bizarre.

lr19703• 2 years ago

By this definition Claude Shannon (the father of Information Theory) clearly deserves a Nobel in Physics. The central concept in Information Theory is Entropy which is defined literally the same way as in Physics. And Shannon's Information Theory clearly revolutionized our life (tele-communications) much more than Hopfield network or Hinton's Boltzmann machine.

drpossum10• 2 years ago

Fun historical fact: Claude Shannon did win the Noble prize

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Noble_Prize#Recipients

rramadass3• 2 years ago

Right; the Nobel Committee has officially "jumped the shark".

Reminds me of the old classic Physics and Politics by Walter Bagehot.

yreg• 2 years ago

Maybe he deserves a nobel prize but in physics?

Which category fits better?

mr_toad2• 2 years ago

The royal science academy fucked up so much with this choice.

Well, you’re talking about it.

huijzer• 2 years ago

In some sense it makes sense to award AI researchers on behalf of the physics community because I know many physics PhD’s who thank their job to AI; they work as data scientist now.

Jokes aside, physics is a bit stuck because it’s hard to do experiments at the boundaries of what we know, as far as I understand. So then it makes sense I guess to award people who made useful tools for physics.

openrisk2• 2 years ago

it’s hard to do experiments at the boundaries of what we know

this applies primarily to fundamental physics. There are many areas of applied physics (materials, fusion, biophysics, atmospheric physics, etc. etc.) where the main constrain is understanding complex systems. These areas are quite crucial for society.

hoseja2• 2 years ago

As evidenced by the search for room temperature low pressure superconductors.

alwinaugustin2• 2 years ago

It’s time to consider adding computer science as a category for the Nobel Prize. They have already been awarded prizes for economic sciences and peace, so why not computer science? It's not the same as physics, and its impact on modern life is undeniable

matsemann2• 2 years ago

Is that even "possible"? As in, they have to follow the rules of the organization, which have some criteria laid out. Not sure who could stop them from changing, though. Like, I think the original intent was to have done the most the preceding year, but now it's more of a lifetime award. So perhaps they can change or add different categories if wanted.

ClassyJacket2• 2 years ago

That's the only reason I can think of for this - like, Alfred Nobel or some other dead donor set rules that they aren't allowed to change now. But I haven't seen anyone confirm it.

amai6• 2 years ago

How about a "Nobel Memorial Prize in Computer Sciences" similar to the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Econ...

ginko2• 2 years ago

Why though? The Turing award exists.

famouswaffles3• 2 years ago

People often say that the Turing award is the Nobel Prize of computing but that's not really true. The Turing award is the most prestigious award in computing yes but that's not enough for Noble like recognition/pedigree.

What makes the Nobel prize unique is that almost anyone, even the general public or pioneers in other fields etc can here you received one and be very impressed. You'll generally be met with blank stares if you told anyone not in computing or an enthusiast you'd won a Turing. Even if you then said, "It's the most prestigious award in computing!", it wouldn't hit the same.

Awards like these are basically only really worth their social recognition, so it's no surprise people would still want a Nobel in Computing/Mathematics etc even with Turing/Field etc existing.

kgwgk3• 2 years ago

They have already been awarded prizes for [..] peace

Since 1901.

anonymousDan3• 2 years ago

What a bunch of BS, yet another field trying to steal the thunder of CS. How often have I had to listen to physicists sneer at CS as not a proper science!

napa3uT2• 2 years ago

thanks the feeling is mutual since comp scientists sneer at physicists too, just for other reasons

anonymousDan3• 2 years ago

Really? Why would comp scientists sneer at physicists?

nabla95• 2 years ago

Most commenters here don't know that Boltzmann machines and associative memories existed in condensed matter physics long before they were used in cognitive science or AI.

The Sherrington–Kirkpatrick model of spin glass is a Hopfield network with random initialization.

Boltzmann machine is Sherrington–Kirkpatrick model with external field.

This is price in physics given to novel use of stochastic spin-glass modelling. Unexpected, but saying this is not physics is not correct.

selimthegrim• 2 years ago

Also double descent was discovered already by physicists in 80s-90s

archmutant• 2 years ago

In curious what's the context for this?

xqcgrek22• 2 years ago

The methods may be inspired by physics, but they have made no contribution to understanding physical laws or phenomena.

It's mathematical/CS work. The connection to actual physical laws or phenomena is even more tenuous than the prize for exoplanets a few years ago.

The Nobel prize physics committee has made itself a joke, and probably destroyed the credibility of the prize.

parodysbird5• 2 years ago

but they have made no contribution to understanding physical laws or phenomena.

Neural networks are used in tons of data pipelines for physics experiments, most notably with particle accelerators.

The Nobel Prize is also occasionally awarded to engineers who develop tools that are important parts of experiments. 2018 for example was awarded for chirped pulse amplification, which is probably best known for being used in LASIK eye surgery, but it is also used in experimental pipelines.

77pt775• 2 years ago

and probably destroyed the credibility of the prize.

From now on I'll always see it as just another nobel peace prize.

This is beyond ridiculous.

twic• 2 years ago

So if they used a genetic algorithm, they could have got the prize for biology?

dawnofdusk3• 2 years ago

There is no nobel prize for biology

dawnofdusk3• 2 years ago

Agree completely, being in this field.

However, it is weird for the committee to give a prize for theoretical physics without an experiment. It is doubly weird when they already made this "mistake" in 2021 with Parisi, who was the odd one out among the geophysicists, and are giving another prize in spin glass/stat phys... why?

nabla95• 2 years ago

In summary, it's definitely related to physics, but kind of weird choice.

Why David Sherrington and Scott Kirkpatrick did not share the price for the Sherrington–Kirkpatrick model? Hopfield is referencing their work?

Multiple theoretical physicists working with black holes (Hawkin's and others) didn't get Nobel, because black holes were not confirmed or theory could not be tested.

radioactivist• 2 years ago

I'm a condensed matter/statistical physicist and am very aware of the connections to statistical physics I still think that the committee has completely lost it with this choice. There is a sharp line for me between things that are inspired by physics and those that are physics (and I really don't buy that physics is anything physicists do) -- and this clearly falls on the "inspired by" side.

aulin• 2 years ago

I know plenty of physicists that would be very pissed off by all this drama.

There is so much more than fundamental physics and there is much more in physics than breakthrough discoveries. Medical physics just to name a fun field everybody always forgets about has been studying and using neural networks since about forty years. Applied physics, biophysics, atmospheric physics. Even particle physics is mostly data science these days.

This idea that physics should only be about fundamental theories and discoveries is really detrimental to the field and leads to the false idea of stagnation that permeates this whole thread.

snitty• 2 years ago

Chemists everywhere are wondering where this furor has been for the forty years or so.

nullhole• 2 years ago

Physicists stole the chemistry prize, now computer scientists are stealing the physics prize, I guess

GistNoesis• 2 years ago

Since most papers nowadays are written by AI, and peer reviewed by AI, it only seemed logical for AI to be used by the Nobel committee to award the godfather of AI.

Thanks to AI, you now only have to to ask any GPT for the source code of the universe to get the code. Since physics is now a solved problem, we should recenter ourselves on more important questions like why did AI create the universe ?

Hopefully AI will have an answer soon.

T-A4• 2 years ago

For what it's worth, the "Advanced information" PDF does a somewhat better job of trying to explain the rationale than the linked press release:

https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2024/09/advanced-physicsp...

amai6• 2 years ago

Interesting. LeCun, Bengio, Schmidhuber and Hochreiter are (amongst others) also mentioned in this article.

karmakurtisaani3• 2 years ago

Eagerly waiting for Schmidhuber's comment on the prize.

ricksunny• 2 years ago

Thanks for finding/providing that link. p.10

"Highly sought-after fundamental particles, such as the Higgs boson, only exist for a fraction of a second after being created in high-energy collisions (e.g. ~10-22 s for the Higgs boson). Their presence needs to be inferred from tracking information and energy deposits in large electronic detectors. Often the anticipated detector signature is very rare and could be mimicked by more common background processes. To identify particle decays and increase the efficiency of analyses, ANNs were trained to pick out specific patterns in the large volumes of detector data being generated at a high rate." (emphasis mine)

It concerns me reading stuff like this (one can find similar for the original LIGO detection of gravitational waves) without accompanying qualification. B/c I want to hear them justify why it shouldn't sound like 'we created something that was trained to beg the question ad nauseam'. Obvs on a social trust basis I have every reason to believe these seminal discoveries are precisely as reported. But I'd just like to see what the stats look like - even if I'm probably incapable of really understanding them - that are able to guarantee the validity of an observation when the observation is by definition new, and therefore has never been detected before, and therefore cannot have produced an a priori test set (outside of simulation) baseline to compare against.

mjburgess3• 2 years ago

I've always sided with Feynman on this, and this proves him right: wtf do these people think they are appointing themselves fit to hand out trinkets and baubles on behalf of global scientific achievement?

It brings the award into disrepute, or at least in a Feynman way, exposes the inherent disreputability of awards themselves: who are they to award such a prize on behalf of physics?

Awards committees: self-serving self-appointed cliques of prestige chasers

_zamorano_• 2 years ago

Altough of course you're right, let's play devil's advocate an imagine a world without Nobel prices.

Laypeople needs a simple way to know who's who in advanced research fields, without Nobel prices (or any other commitee) we don't get to have that.

If people gets to ignore (more) such topics, it's likely politicians, and universities react accordingly, and funnel funds to other enterprises.

All these prices (I'd say writing prices are much worse) are typically super corrupt, but at least keep the field in people minds.

danielbarla• 2 years ago

The economics of this topic have always been interesting to me, especially when compared to various other fields. What is there to incentivize people to enter STEM fields, and especially research?

As a point of comparison, there are ~540 premier league football players, with an average salary of 3.5 million pounds. (Yes, that's average, not median, but there's less than 20 of them that earn under 200k.) It's not _that_ exclusive of a club, and the remuneration is insanely disproportionate, compared to academics - I highly doubt there are hundreds of researches earning millions.

So, yes, it's pretty odd to have some random people dish out these prizes, and they are a drop in the pond. However, I personally feel it's way too little, and that the targets of the prizes are far more deserving - even if it's a popularity contest - than random entertainers (even if they are quite entertaining). But, it's up for argument, and the markets obviously don't seem to agree with me.

drpossum10• 2 years ago

Laypeople needs a simple way to know who's who in advanced research fields

What need of a layperson does knowing "who's who" in advanced research fields fill?

Here's another good question related to that: Who is qualified to simplify that so that the need is filled?

YeGoblynQueenne5• 2 years ago

> Laypeople needs a simple way to know who's who in advanced research fields, without Nobel prices (or any other commitee) we don't get to have that.

I think first you're underestimating "laypeople" which seems to include many scientists who are not physicists, and second you are forgetting that many of the scientists the "lay" public knows as the greatest of all times never received a Nobel, or any other famous prize: Einstein, Newton, Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo, etc etc.

Der_Einzige3• 2 years ago

Google scholar rankings of conferences or individuals by H-index or citations is a perfect way for both lay people and academics to measure each others achievements.

wodenokoto2• 2 years ago

And who are the Oscar’s to give out awards to movies?

You can hand out the MJBurgess awards for non-NN-related physics today!

mjburgess3• 2 years ago

That goes to the latest work by researches in Gaussian processes, of course.

atonse• 2 years ago

Even though the many of the Oscars nowadays feel rigged (with full lobbying arms from the studios behind them), my understanding was that the "Academy" (from the Academy Awards) consists mostly of your fellow filmmakers.

So it is an honor bestowed by your peers, the ones who would most appreciate the quality of the work and the work that went into it.

tycho-newman2• 2 years ago

In the old days, you’d get a knighthood or a peerage for such achievements.

But honestly, I’d still prefer cash.

sorenjan• 2 years ago

wtf do these people think they are appointing themselves fit to hand out trinkets and baubles on behalf of global scientific achievement?

https://www.kva.se/en/prizes/nobel-prizes/the-nomination-and...

https://www.kva.se/en/about-us/members/list-of-academy-membe...

who are they to award such a prize on behalf of physics?

They're not awarding anything in the name of physics, they're awarding a prize in the name of the Nobel committee.

openrisk2• 2 years ago

This does indeed smell of desperation. Which is really, really sad. Advances in _real_ physics are central to the absolutely needed sustainability transition. In a sane society that values its self-preservation you would not need to grasp at second-order straws to justify the need for all sorts of both fundamental and applied physics research.

We need to think seriously whether our collective hallucinations (pun) have got us to some sort of tipping point, undermining our very ability to act according to our best long-term interests.

ps. not to imply anything negative about the worthiness of the awardees in general

soheil5• 2 years ago

Totally agree, for too many years some of the smartest people have been dedicating their lives to the development of FarmVille and AngryBirds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive

DiogenesKynikos9• 2 years ago

There's a long backlog of major achievements in physics that haven't gotten a Nobel Prize in Physics.

Giving the prize to something that has essentially nothing to do with physics is just a slap in the face to the physics community.

cosmic_quanta2• 2 years ago

I can only think of major achievements in my (narrow) field of study.

What do you think could have reasonably been awarded?

DiogenesKynikos9• 2 years ago

Three off the top of my head:

The measurement of the Hubble constant using delay times between multiple images of lensed supernovae.

The first transit spectrum of an exoplanet atmosphere.

The first directly imaged exoplanet.

(They could hand out Nobel Prizes in the field of exoplanets like candy.)

nodfyr• 2 years ago

The computation of the cosmic microwave background fluctuations hasn't received a nobel prize yet. It's had a deep impact on how we understand the Universe.

Some people still alive who made important contributions to this are Rees and Sunyaev.

topaz03• 2 years ago

Something for nonequilibrium statistical mechanics

Kon-Peki• 2 years ago

a slap in the face to the physics community

The physics community could use a few more slaps in the face, according to many physicists.

mhh__• 2 years ago

The response of the physicists they say should get a slap is, in programming terms, basically shut up and show me the code. It's a fairly one sided debate that we're blessed with seeing in literally every thread anywhere about it

underlines• 2 years ago

Here's a resounding 'slap' delivered by one physicist to his peers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBIvSGLkwJY

hcks• 2 years ago

Could you please list say the top 5 Nobel worthy achievements of this backlog

amusedcyclist• 2 years ago

Yeah this is absolutely disgusting tbh, revising my opinion of all previous nobels way down now

tombert5• 2 years ago

It still kind of baffles me that there isn't a Nobel Prize in Mathematics and/or computer science.

The latter makes a bit more sense, computer science wasn't really a thing when Alfred Nobel was around, but mathematics certainly was! It seems like it would be perfectly reasonable to add a category for math, and I think Neural Nets would fit in there considerably better.

shombaboor2• 2 years ago

the fields medal fills that gap

lukasga• 2 years ago

The story is that it is because Alfred Nobel was cheated on by a mathematician (hilarious, but unconfirmed)

http://nobelprizes.com/nobel/why_no_math.html#story

aDyslecticCrow7• 2 years ago

The Swedish central bank later added the price in economics (although controversial). So other things can be amended. However, I suspect we won't see any more amendments to the noble price.

A different institution can step up and make a price on its own, though I'm not sure what institution would have that amount of prestige without weaponizing it for commercial purposes.

I prefer a nicer price for mathematics that includes a bit of computer science than a price for computer science. I don't think there is much room for a "society-changing innovation" within CS that isn't either an engineering feat (Linux, Docker, FFmpeg) or an algorithm that could fit under a mathematics price (FFT, Navier Stokes).

drpgq• 2 years ago

I'm surprised someone hasn't done it similar to the economics award that came later.

canjobear2• 2 years ago

I understand the frustration, but a lot of Geoff Hinton's foundational work was based on physics principles. For example https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/1993/file/9e3cfc48eccf8...

DiogenesKynikos9• 2 years ago

Information theory, which is foundational to computing, has some mathematical similarities to statistical mechanics. That doesn't make it physics.

gandalfgreybeer2• 2 years ago

My adviser's PhD dissertation (PhD Physics) has Hopkins as one of her major references. This is grounded in Physics.

krishnasangeeth• 2 years ago

Turing award and now Nobel prize in physics, something which he would have never expected. What an amazing career!

DiogenesKynikos9• 2 years ago

"The Nobel Prize for Stuff We Think is Cool."

deepnet• 2 years ago

As a former Alumni of Hinton’s MOOC I can attest to his humble, kind nature and clarity, & erudition as a teacher.

Modelling learning as entropy, and heat in his Boltzmann machines was genius as was the 1980s backdrop paper.

Geoff tirelessly evangelised neural nets and machine learning right from his 1970s phd days at Edinburgh.

Despite being in the academic wilderness during the many decades of symbolic AI.

Moore’s law ( & parallel processing via GPUs ) finally caught up with Geoff’s vision and proved him right.

Well deserved !

ak_111• 2 years ago

The contrast in discoveries made in 'core' physics in the first 25 years of the last centuries compared to this century is quite insane, it was never going to be sustainable. If it did sustain we would be colonising a new galaxy by now.

Consider that in 1900 the atom wasn't discovered yet, within around 25 years the basic principles of quantum physics were established, to say nothing about discoveries in cosmology (GR + big bang).

meindnoch2• 2 years ago

Baffling. If this isn't a sign of a major crisis in physics, then I don't know what is.

amai6• 2 years ago

Peak AI Hype! Winter is coming!

rory_h_r• 2 years ago

I like to imagine this is for the 80s AI hype and another one will come out in 40 years for ChatGPT.

pyb• 2 years ago

Maybe the story here isn't so much whether Hinton is a physicist or not, but rather a lack of groundbreaking progress in physics to give the Nobel to.

eleveriven2• 2 years ago

A profound moment where physics, neuroscience and artificial intelligence intersect.

seydor6• 2 years ago

very little to do with neuroscience

Separo2• 2 years ago

Except that the development of deep neural networks took direct inspiration biological neuroscience with neurons and synapses. Neural is even in the name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_learning

NotYourLawyer2• 2 years ago

Very little to do with physics.

comment423• 2 years ago

More to do with neuroscience than you think. Fukushima took direct inspiration from Hubel & Wiesel's nobel prize in the 1960s when developing the neocognitron, which turned into convolutional neural networks. Hopfield networks are a model for associative memory. And, well, then there is the perceptron. There was always a link and mutual inspiration.

Recommended reading: Lindsay, G. W. (2021). Convolutional neural networks as a model of the visual system: Past, present, and future. Journal of cognitive neuroscience, 33(10), 2017-2031. https://direct.mit.edu/jocn/article-abstract/33/10/2017/9740...

dboreham• 2 years ago

At the very least neuroscience provides an "existence proof". Somehow this stuff must be possible using some sort of trained machine comprising a large number of simple components...

whymauri• 2 years ago

It's funny because I learned about Hopfield multiple times in neuroscience classes, but never once in an EECS/ML course.

what373736• 2 years ago

This is missing /s

eterevsky• 2 years ago

To be fair, Nobel Prize has a history of expanding the traditional bounds of respective fields when awarding the prizes:

Bertrand Russel got the Nobel prize in literature

Daniel Kahneman got Nobel in economics

moralestapia2• 2 years ago

Bob Dylan on literature was another "hmm" one.

Not against nor in favor, it was just an unexpected awardee.

tycho-newman2• 2 years ago

Bob Dylan is the Boomer poet laureate.

raincole3• 2 years ago

War criminials got Nobel prize in peace.

jvanderbot3• 2 years ago

Which were you referring to?

aerhardt• 2 years ago

Winston Churchill got a Nobel in literature, too.

TMWNN• 2 years ago

Yes, but for his History of the English-Speaking Peoples, and more broadly, for his lifetime as an author.

(Admittedly, even more broadly, the prize was the Nobel Committee wanting to acknowledge his leadership in WW2, but still.)

kuschku• 2 years ago

The economics prize is not a Nobel prize.

iandanforth• 2 years ago

"Although not one of the five Nobel Prizes established by Alfred Nobel's will in 1895, it is commonly referred to as the Nobel Prize in Economics, and is administered and referred to along with the Nobel Prizes by the Nobel Foundation. Winners of the Prize in Economic Sciences are chosen in a similar manner as and announced alongside the Nobel Prize recipients, and receive the Prize in Economic Sciences at the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony."

- Wikipedia

gwervc• 2 years ago

Don't forget Barack Obama for absolutely no valid reason.

TechDebtDevin• 2 years ago

Hey he got the Peace Prize for conducting a war in the middle east!

splintfrog89• 2 years ago

Real physics and its resulting breakthrough technologies have been hidden from society for a very long time. And so they simply need somebody they can give that price to.

gyre007• 2 years ago

This reminded me of my Hopfield networks implementation in Go [1]. The algorithm is rather simple but fascinating nevertheless and works surprisingly well for reconstructing noisy images. I actually blogged about it as well [2]. But as many are discussing here Deep Memory networks based on Boltzmann networks are more powerful yet they don't seem to have found much use case either

[1] https://github.com/milosgajdos/gopfield [2] https://cybernetist.com/2017/03/12/hopfield-networks-in-go/

aborsy• 2 years ago

Terrible. Hopfield networks nobody cares about, and few heard of?

kwar13• 2 years ago

In physics...?

barrenko• 2 years ago

Well, the easiest way to enter the ML field is to pivot from theoretical physics.

VHRanger• 2 years ago

Geoffrey Hinton wins the Nobel prize in physics for giving physics postdocs more reasonable job market options

alsodumb• 2 years ago

Lol I almost choked laughing at this lmaoo

EXHades• 2 years ago

lol,All for employment

fnands2• 2 years ago

And as an ML engineer with a PhD in physics I can tell you that I am deeply grateful that I didn't have to go the postdoc route.

I know we are joking around here, but damn, just for that alone I'm happy that he got it.

For whether it is actually physics? That I'll leave for another discussion.

scarmig6• 2 years ago

This prize is more of a settler colonialist land grab by physicists. ML is just a subfield of physics (like every other field), so let's make sure that everyone knows that it's in our domain.

Speaking as a onetime physicist now in ML...

ahdhdixud• 2 years ago

Ok, now I understand why this is a notable achievement in physics

physicsguy2• 2 years ago

This is totally bizarre, no precedent for it really. The reality of the prize means that less and less are the winners names every physicist has heard of, but even today they're still big names in each subfield. For e.g. Kosterlitz, Thouless and Haldane weren't exactly household names but they really deserved the prize in 2016.

In this case, there's a good argument that Hopfield had conducted strong work as a physicist and in physics, but Geoffrey Hinton has never worked as a Physicist, at best adopting some existing things from physics into cognitive science use cases. In any case, what they've been given the prize for is work where they've not contributed to the understanding of the world of physics - it's not even really an arguable case where this is work that crosses over between Physics and another field either. It'd be like if Black or Scholes had been given the Physics prize rather than Economics because their famous equation can be re-written in Schrodinger equation form.

ianbicking• 2 years ago

Bob Dylan got a Nobel prize in literature, which feels something like a precedence.

ngcc_hk5• 2 years ago

The key is field. A physicist use maths will not get maths prize if just use it for physics.

He use words and its lyrics has meaning, like any literature. Cannot say poetry is not literature. Then why not poetry with music, probably more traditional as many poems are songs. In some culture, it must be singable.

These use physics but not in the field of physics. Otherwise anyone use qm can get Nobel prize and chemistry people can get one as they all use physics. Really need to be in the physics field. You can use other method like computer, maths.

robotresearcher2• 2 years ago

The citation has a large section on the impact of DNNs on physics research practice. They cite mega-projects that depend on this tech, for example. Hinton's inventions are a contribution to physics, not a contribution in physics. Hopfield of course was a bone fide physicist.

physicsguy2• 2 years ago

I just find that justification really strange - you could have made the same argument about K&R or John Backus because C and Fortran have had enormous impacts on Physics research, much more so than AI has to date.

Separo2• 2 years ago

Well maybe in time ML will help break through the high energy physics roadblocks.

elashri4• 2 years ago

One of the very early successful applications of ML was using neural network and other models in particle identification systems in particle physics experiments.

moelf2• 2 years ago

it already had, bottom-quark tagging has improved O(10)x in efficiency in the last decade without any new "physics" understanding, just from training with more low-level data and better ML arch (now using Transformers)

but we haven't found new physics with or without ML, making this prize a little weird.

seanhunter3• 2 years ago

I sort of agree in principle but in practise they've always taken a broad view.

Kissinger was one of the most prominent disrupters of world peace in the postwar era but that didn't stop him winning the peace prize. Churchill won the literature prize for defeating Hitler. The blue led guys a few years back didn't do much except make a thing that would go on every single consumer gadget and disrupt my sleep but they won the physics prize.

Even when they get it right they often get it wrong. For example I believe Einstein supposedly won for "especially his work on the photoelectric effect" rather than relativity.

telotortium• 2 years ago

Maybe it's a prize for hope and change that physics will be revolutionized by neural networks? Similar to how Obama got a Nobel Peace Prize in order to repudiate Bush's legacy in Iraq and Afghanistan. While Bush's legacy absolutely deserved to be repudiated, I don't think awarding a new president the Peace Prize was the best way to do it, especially because in the foreign policy realm, he ended up not so different from Bush.

slashdave5• 2 years ago

How about a prize for the Monte Carlo simulation methods needed as input to these models?

dguest• 2 years ago

We used ML to discover the Higgs.

Whether or not the original Higgs discovery decay channels used ML, confirming that it was in fact the Higgs required measuring the decay to b-quarks, which has used ML since the LHC started taking data.

Over the lifetime of the LHC, he backgrounds got around 10x smaller for the same "efficiency" (fraction of true b-quarks tagged) if you want to be pedantic about the definitions. We've used NNs in b-tagging for decades now, so it was always possible to dial in a threshold for tagging that was e.g. 70% efficient.

Transformers gave us a factor of a few smaller backgrounds in the last few years though [1].

[1] https://atlas.web.cern.ch/Atlas/GROUPS/PHYSICS/PLOTS/FTAG-20...

ww5202• 2 years ago

ML absolutely has helped astrophysics in sorting the massive amount of observation data to make new discovery.

bnegreve• 2 years ago

Most disciplines in CS have done that one way or another.

Yizahi• 2 years ago

So if someone will invent say a new keyboard layout which will improve median data input rate by 10% and will be used by astrophysicists then it will be worthy of the astrophysics prize? Or better yet - in your example the main driver for the ML is Nvidia, should be award Jensen a prize in astrophysics? Or in any other field where ML is deployed? In my opinion we should separate efforts of people making tools, from the efforts of people doing research using said tools.

OneDonOne4• 2 years ago

So do telescopes. Has anyone every won a Nobel for a telescope?

slashdave5• 2 years ago

If I may be so bold, a breakthrough will require new experimental techniques, and we aren't likely to get those from ML.

chrsw4• 2 years ago

Hinton was never going to win the Nobel Prize while working for Google, right?

behnamoh2• 2 years ago

are you saying that's part of his reason to leave Google?

chrsw4• 2 years ago

That's my suspicion, yes.

querez• 2 years ago

what makes you say/think that?

chipdart2• 2 years ago

Hinton was never going to win the Nobel Prize while working for Google, right?

This conspiracy theory makes no sense. Nobel prizes are awarded based on someone's life's work.

chrsw4• 2 years ago

I think calling it a conspiracy theory is a bit of a stretch. I could be wrong. I agree that's how it should be. But I don't get the impression there are lot of fans of Google in the Prize Committee. Either way, it's not something that matters too much. Just a thought.

numpad0• 2 years ago

I genuinely think there is potential for a silly Internet tradition here. Google should pick bunch of candidate winners by ML, hire them six months before, fire them all a week before awarding, and then programmatically re-hire moments before awarding. It can't be more malicious than most academic pranks and it shouldn't matter whether the conspiracy is real, it'll be just funny.

chronolitus• 2 years ago

Moreso genuine curiosity than as a gotcha: A lot of comments are saying this was the wrong choice. I'd find it really interesting to hear who the nomination should have gone to instead, in your opinions.

tgv• 2 years ago

They are not under an obligation to award the prize. They could have just said "sorry, we can't think of anyone."

mishaevtikhiev• 2 years ago

My perspective as a PhD in theoretical physics, who's been doing deep learning in the last 4 years:

1. The prize itself makes zero sense as a prize in _physics_. Even the official announcement by the Nobel Prize Committee, taken at a face value, reads as a huge stretch in trying to link neural networks to physics. When one starts asking questions about the real impact on physics and whether the most important works of Hinton and Hopfield were really informed by physics (which is a dubious link to the Nobel prize anyway), the argument stops holding water at all.

2. Some of the comments mention that giving prize for works in AI may make sense, because physics is currently stalled. This is wrong for several reasons: 2.1. While one can argue that string theory (which is, anyway, only a part of high-energy theoretical physics) is having its "AI winter" moment, there are many other areas of physics which develop really fast and bring exciting results. 2.2. The Nobel Prize is often awarded with quite some delay, so there are many very impactful works from 80s which haven't been awarded with a Nobel prize (atomic force microscopy is a nice example). 2.3. It is wrong to look at the recent results in some sub-field and say "okay, there was nothing of value in this field". For example, even if one completely discards string theory as bogus, there were many important results in theoretical physics such as creation of conformal field theory, which was never recognized with a Nobel Prize (which is OK if Nobel Prize is given to other important physical works, but is quite strange in the light of today's announcement).

To finish on a lighter mood, I'll quote a joke from my friend, who stayed in physics: "Apparently the committee has looked at all the physicists who left academia and decided that anything they do is fair game. We should maybe expect they will give a prize for crypto or high-frequency trading some time later".

fooker5• 2 years ago

because physics is currently stalled.

Even if it's not completely true, maybe some introspection is required?

I understand developing new theories is important and rewarding, but most physics for the last three decades seems to fall within two buckets. (1) Smash particles and analyze the data. (2) Mathematical models that are not falsifiable.

We can be pretty sure that the next 'new physics' discovery that gives us better chips, rocket propulsion, etc etc is going to get a nobel prize pretty quickly similar to mRNA.

bunderbunder2• 2 years ago

Those two buckets only contain the work in physics that have a sustained presence in popular media. But take gravitational wave astronomy as a counterexample. It doesn't make it into the news much, but I'm pretty sure the entire field is less than ten years old.

codethief• 2 years ago

most physics

That's an interesting definition of "most physics". I mean, I find high-energy physics as fascinating as the next guy but there are other fields, too, you know, like astrophysics & cosmology, condensed-matter physics, (quantum) optics, environmental physics, biophysics, medical physics, …

soheil5• 2 years ago

Just because there happens to be economical viability for a field currently doesn't mean that field needs less introspection. Exactly what research contributions the people who are throwing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of GPUs at the next random "research" problem at the top of the queue at Microsoft or Google are making to deserve a Nobel?

Too often there is near zero intuition for why research in AI yields such incredible results. They're mainly black boxes that happen to work extremely well with no explanation and someone at a prestigious institution just happened to be there to stamp their name on top of the publication.

Big difference between research in AI and any non-computational/statistical/luck-based science.

tonetegeatinst• 2 years ago

Wdym physicics is stalled? I was told we just need to build larger collider's.

bmitc3• 2 years ago

By the same people who guaranteed they'd see certain things at the existing energy levels but now all of the sudden need higher energy levels after they didn't find what they were looking for.

fat_cantor• 2 years ago

A Hopfield network is a lot more like physics than biology, but agreed that the conformal field theorists should have been recognized before Hopfield and/or Hinton. Jim Simons would have been deserving too, IMHO, far more for his work at RenTec than for Chern-Simons theory

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK2• 2 years ago

The Hopfield paper was published in a Biophysics section of Proc. NatL Acad. Sci., and was followed by a flood of spin-glass papers in Phys Review A and similar. So there is some connection to physics.

hsuz• 2 years ago

I'd rather they withhold the prize this year, if there isn't really anything interesting happening in physics.

worstspotgain2• 2 years ago

When the most significant advance since electrification needs to hop the fence to be recognized, perhaps it's time to add a new field. It can be done, the Economics prize was added in 1968.

ogogmad• 2 years ago

Nice idea. You could also have a Nobel prize in applied mathematics, perhaps? This would cover ML and physics.

That said, your idea would make physicists less outraged.

Etheryte• 2 years ago

This is unlikely to ever happen, because Nobel explicitly excluded mathematics from the list of prizes in his will. There are plenty of awards and prizes for every field imaginable, not everything has to be a Nobel prize to be worthy of recognition.

InDubioProRubio• 2 years ago

Then again, its just mathturbation, but standalone and it can pretend to have a theory of everything, so fits well into the field.

amarcheschi2• 2 years ago

I like this idea, after all math is its own field of study. We might call it "field prize" or something like that (this comment is just a pun)

wslh2• 2 years ago

Sincerely, I don't like a shadow cast over the Turing and Gödel prizes. These awards have long honored groundbreaking achievements in computing and logic.

pantalaimon• 2 years ago

the economics prize is not 'official', it was established by the Swedish National Bank in honor to Alfred Nobel.

NlightNFotis2• 2 years ago

I see this written a lot, and I don’t get it.

What matters for an award is that people recognise it as a prestigious accolade.

The economics prize, while not “official”, is still recognised by everyone in economics as the highest honour in the field. Who cares if it’s “official” or not?

Awards and prizes derive their value from their social recognition, which it has a solid amount of, at the very least.

antientropic• 2 years ago

The economics prize is listed on nobelprize.org ("the official website of the Nobel Prize") along with the other Nobel prizes, so I don't think you can justify calling it "unofficial".

Perhaps if the ACM renamed the Turing Award to "The Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Computer Science", the Nobel Foundation would let them get away with it.

tzs2• 2 years ago

That makes it sound like it has no connection to the other prizes.

It's awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, who also award the Physics and Chemistry prizes. Its winner is announced with the winners of the original prizes. The winner in included in the annual Nobel Prize Award ceremony in Stockholm, and receives a medal, diploma, and monetary grant award document from the King of Sweden at that ceremony. The Nobel Foundation counts it when they say their are 6 prize categories, and includes its winners on their lists of Nobel laureates.

It only differs from say the Chemistry prize in that it was established in memory of Nobel instead of by Nobel and the prize money doesn't come from Nobel's estate.

jedrek• 2 years ago

The economics prize is not an actual Nobel prize, but something "inspired" by the Nobel prize. It's little more than a tool to push neoliberal policies to the public, with 34 of the 56 winners tied to the Chicago School of Economics.

77pt775• 2 years ago

They just hijacked the prestige of the field.

Like medical doctors did with the term doctor and psychiatrists by claiming they were doing medicine.

The list is almost endeless.

hm236• 2 years ago

IMO Turing Award is plenty prestigious - and has more legitimacy as its awarded by the relevant community (ACM) - rather than some small group (the Swedish Academy of Sciences) - tbh on that vein I'd say the right thing to do is to ditch the Nobel and let each community in the relevant field decide as a community the work to honor - prevent fiascos like this.

(and, working in the field, I completely disagree with the qualification as "most ...." - it has well known deficiencies and has not yet stood the test of time)

jebarker2• 2 years ago

most significant advance since electrification

I just don't see how this can be claimed at this point.

shiandow2• 2 years ago

Well, society would collapse without computers so I think the description is apt.

At best you could argue that they're the same phenomenon, but then you might equally well argue electrification is just the consequence of steam engines.

throw_m2393392• 2 years ago

Congrats to the laureates! Maybe a Computing prize should be created though, like Nobel did not create the "nobel prize of economy".Though you could argue that Computing is Math? What are computer scientists usually awarded with?

edit: s/rewarded/awarded

jvanderbot3• 2 years ago

I think there's some backlash against a google-able answer here.

However, from memory the list of biggest awards for CS/Math are:

Fields medal

Abel prize

Turing award

Godel award

amarcheschi2• 2 years ago

Kanellakis award too for theoretical cs https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Kanellakis_Award

seanhunter3• 2 years ago

I don't think Geoff Hinton is in the running for a Fields medal[1] any more, unless they did what they did for Andrew Wiles and give him a "quantized" Fields medal.

[1] You have to be under 40. https://www.fields.utoronto.ca/aboutus/jcfields/fields_medal...

astura• 2 years ago

What are computer scientists usually rewarded with?

The Turing Award is considered by most to be the highest award in computer science.

jprete2• 2 years ago

Hinton already won a Turing award, so this Nobel just seems doubly absurd.

I hope he turns it down, but it's a monetary prize too and it takes a lot of dedication to science to turn it down.

throw_m2393392• 2 years ago

Oh yeah! I forgot about this one! Extremely prestigious in CS but less known by the public unfortunately.

bjornsing4• 2 years ago

Honestly it feels a bit weird with a Nobel laureate in physics who probably knows a lot less physics than even I* do… Makes me cringe a bit to be honest.

Also makes me sad when I think about all the physicists and engineers who have made the chips that can train multi-billion parameter neural networks possible. I mean the so-called “bitter lesson” of AI is basically “don’t bet against the physicists at ASML et al”. No prize for them?

(*) I have a humble masters in engineering physics, but work in ML and software.

mensetmanusman• 2 years ago

I work in industry supporting these supply chains; our advancements are part of a hive mind that could be harmed if individuals were artificially highlighted for achievement.

The academics can have their awards, we smile seeing the world change a bit at a time.

bjornsing4• 2 years ago

Nothing wrong with picking some random people out of a hive mind. There seems to be some notable contributions around EUV for example [1].

And BTW, is the same not true for machine learning? I don’t think many have even read the Boltzmann machine paper. It’s basically a footnote in the history of deep learning. It has no practical significance today.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_ultraviolet_lithogra...

lagrange77• 2 years ago

I'm annoyed that he was awarded just now, obviously as a reaction to ChatGPT and the breakthrough of LLMs. If his work is worthy, it has been worthy many years ago.

This reinforces the reduction of ML to LLMs, just like the use of the term AI.

MeteorMarc• 2 years ago

Now,it is also too late for Kohonen, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teuvo_Kohonen

tommysson• 2 years ago

How do LeCun and Bengio feel about being left out of the most prestigous prize of them all? (Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, and Yoshua Bengio was together awarded the Turing prize in 2018...)

randcraw3• 2 years ago

Only three can win. Do those two deserve recognition more than Hopfield?

quantum_state2• 2 years ago

Feynman would voice his objections if he were alive ... what about nature was discovered? ANN is an application of a variant of Universal Approximation Theorem ...

saithound• 2 years ago

Feynman was a well-known proponent of AI and neural networks [1]. He even gave popular lectures on the subject [2]. He also claimed that replicating animal-like visual recognition abilities in machines would be Nobel-worthy; deep learning was certainoy a breakthrough in that.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2209.00083

[2] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ipRvjS7q1DI

drpossum10• 2 years ago

None of these arguments support giving a prize for this in this field for this reason. Feynman was also critical of the idea of the prize in general

parodysbird5• 2 years ago

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037015731...

"Jet substructure at the Large Hadron Collider: A review of recent advances in theory and machine learning"

randcraw3• 2 years ago

IMO this award recognizes the effort and success of modeling the acquisition of knowledge, especially toward realizing such models in usable ways that will surely redefine life on this planet forever. Few Nobels have recognized work that is so culturally groundbreaking (and so disruptive). It'd be hard to see the Nobels as a significant measure of science/technology if they did NOT acknowledge the revolution begat by ML using DL. And with Hopfield at age 91 and Hinton 76, now is the right time to do so.

_visgean• 2 years ago

Well they should have given it to the guy who discovered the famous equation e=mc2 + ai..

https://www.reddit.com/r/LinkedInLunatics/comments/13tbfqm/w...

firtoz2• 2 years ago

So that means AI = 0

Perfect

randcraw3• 2 years ago

Not AI = A?

jprete2• 2 years ago

That guy is more techbro than I can really handle.

muratgozel• 2 years ago

Just watched the nobel prize live stream, surprised by the topic, looks very engineering to me rather than physics, do algorithms make physics subsidiary?

Anon84• 2 years ago

Both Hopefield Networks and Boltzmann machines trace their origins and motivations to Statistical Mechanics and Spin Glasses.

Coincidently, Giorgio Parisi got the 2021 Nobel prize for his work on spin glasses

adamnemecek• 2 years ago

It’s closely related to statistical mechanics.

aDyslecticCrow7• 2 years ago

The physics prize has historically taken the role of both "innovation/engineering" topics and "mathematics". It's more broad than simply physics.

The most important factor tends to be the positive impact on society, as that's one of the price's core tenets.

andrepd2• 2 years ago

The most important factor tends to be the positive impact on society

Making it even more baffling that this won then

quaxi2• 2 years ago

In the original will, invention is given the same weight as discovery.

One could also argue that in 1895, applied computer science and information theory would be considered physics.

hackernewds3• 2 years ago

why? this should be questioned

viraj_shah• 2 years ago

I am really surprised. I would have guessed that a Nobel Prize would be awarded to advancements in the field itself. Not for inspirations from it or to tools that led to advancements. Although as I write this I'm sure there have been several prizes awarded to scientists / engineers who have developed tools to advance physics. Like radio astronomy? Still surprised though.

parodysbird5• 2 years ago

Some other recent cases of the prize being given to an engineering contribution:

- 2018 was for chirped pulse amplification, which is most commonly used in medicine (LASIK surgery for example)

- 2014 was for basically for LED lights

- 2010 was for a method for producing graphene

- 2009 was for both charge-coupled device, which is a component for digital imaging (including regular consumer digital cameras), and fibre-optic cables

andrepd2• 2 years ago

Eh. """AI""" is all the rage so I guess even the nobel in physics has to have something to do with this. Not a fan

stainablesteel• 2 years ago

i reason it from the perspective that its because they've found a way to make a machine out of bits that no one's ever made before, they're physical objects

jhbadger3• 2 years ago

Well in 1912, the physics prize went to a guy who designed a better light for light houses and buoys to prevent shipwrecks! Actually, most early Nobels went to practical things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustaf_Dal%C3%A9n

hackernewds3• 2 years ago

you could consider them very important building blocks. if far enough in time, the wheel would've been a worthy winner

chriskanan2• 2 years ago

Here is the reasoning: https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2024/09/advanced-physicsp...

I'm surprised Terry Sejnowski isn't included, considering it seems to be for Hopfield Nets and Boltzmann machines, where Terry played a large role in the latter.

whizzter2• 2 years ago

He was probably considered since he is mentioned in the reasoning paper, still it could be one of those unfortunate omissions in the nobel history since those deciding the prize might have a hard time to measure impact.

gtirloni• 2 years ago

Then they shouldn't be trusted to give awards in an area they are not experts in.

KingFelix• 2 years ago

Yeah, Terry is a rockstar, and pumping out tons of papers. Maybe they google scholared, list by citations?

dang2• 2 years ago

I guess it makes sense to use that link above since it goes into much more detail. Changed from https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2024/summary/. Thanks!

thrdbndndn• 2 years ago

I know it's one day late but I personally don't agree with this change.

Using the main entry webpage is much easier for people to look for relevant info, including but not limited to: various articles about this specific award; other info about this year's Nobel, other info about Nobel in general.

This is exactly what the Internet (or WWW) is better than traditional printing media. Using a PDF as a link (which itself can be easily found from the entry point) defeats it.

mistercheph• 2 years ago

Whether or not these fields are meaningfully distinct is a matter of taste, despite the fashion being to imagine a plurality of interconnected but autonomous domains.

hxnamer• 2 years ago

Is this a widely accepted version of neural network history? I recognize Rosenblatt, Perceptron, etc., but I have never heard that Hopfield nets or Bolzmann machines were given any major weight in the history.

The descriptions I have read were all mathematical, focusing on the computational graph with the magical backpropagation (which frankly is just memoizing intermediate computations). The descriptions also went out of their way to discourage terms like "synapses" and rather use "units".

Onavo3• 2 years ago

The deep learning variety of neural networks are heavily simplified, mostly linear versions of biological neurons. They don't resemble anything between your ears. Real life neurons are generally modeled by differential equations (in layman terms, have many levels of feedback loops tied to time), not the simplified ones used in dense layer activation functions.

Here are some examples

https://snntorch.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tutorials/tutorial...

dongecko• 2 years ago

Bolzman machines were there in the very early days of deep learning. It was a clever hack to train deep nets layer wise and work with limited ressources.

Each layer was trained similar to the encoder part of an autoencoder. This way the layerwise transformations were not random, but roughly kept some of the original datas properties. Up to here training was done without the use of labelled data. After this training stage was done, you had a very nice initialization for your network and could train it end to end according to your task and target label.

If I recall correctly, the neural layers output was probabilistic. Because of that you couldn't simply use back propagation to learn the weights. Maybe this is the connection to John Hopkins work. But here my memory is a bit fuzzy.

godelski• 2 years ago

  > I have never heard that Hopfield nets or Bolzmann machines were given any major weight in the history.

This is mostly because people don't realize what these are at more abstract levels (it's okay, ironically ML people frequently don't abstract). But Hopfield networks and Boltzmann machines have been pretty influential to the history of ML. I think you can draw a pretty good connection from Hopfield to LSTM to transformers. You can also think of a typical artificial neural network (easiest if you look at linear layers) as a special case of a Boltzmann machine (compare Linear Layers/Feed Forward Networks to Restricted Boltzmann Machines and I think it'll click).

Either way, these had a lot of influence on the early work, which does permeate into the modern stuff. There's this belief that all the old stuff is useless and I just think that's wrong. There's a lot of hand engineered stuff that we don't need anymore, but a lot of the theory and underlying principles are still important.

legel• 2 years ago

Restricted Boltzmann Machines were a huge revolution in the field, warranting a publication in Science in 2006. If you want to know what the field looks like back then, here it is: https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/absps/science.pdf

I remember in 2012 for my MS thesis on Deep Neural Networks spending several pages on Boltzmann Machines and the physics-inspired theories of Geoffrey Hinton.

My undergraduate degree was in physics.

So, yes, I think this is an absolutely stunning award. The connections between statistical entropy (inspired by thermodynamics) and also of course from biophysics of human neural networks should not be lost here.

Anyways, congratulations to Geoffrey Hinton. And also, since physics is the language of physical systems, why not expand the definition of the field to include the "physics of intelligence"?

From their official explanation page (https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2024/09/advanced-physicsp...): "With ANNs the boundaries of physics are extended to host phenomena of life as well as computation."

chriskanan2• 2 years ago

Of the people who are still alive, Hopfield and Hinton make sense.

Hopfield networks led to Boltzmann machines. Deep learning started with showing that deep neural networks were viable in Hinton's 2006 Science paper, where he showed that by pre-training with a Restricted Boltzmann machine (essentially a stacked self-supervised auto-encoder) as a form of weight initialization, it was possible to effectively train neural networks with more than 2 layers. Prior to that finding, people found it was very hard to get backprop to work with more than 2 layers due to the activation functions people were using and problematic weight initialization procedures.

So long story short, while neither of them are in widespread use today, they led to demonstrating that neural networks were a viable technology and provided the FIRST strategy for successfully training deep neural networks. A few years later, people figured out ways to do this without the self-supervised pre-training phase by using activation functions with better gradient flow properties (ReLUs), better weight initialization procedures, and training on large datasets using GPUs. So without the proof of concept enabled by Restricted Boltzmann Machines, deep learning may not have become a thing, since prior to that almost all of the AI community (which was quite small) was opposed to neural networks except for a handful of evangelists (Geoff Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Yann LeCun, Terry Sejnowski, Gary Cottrell, and a handful of other folks).

seydor6• 2 years ago

Second time he gets overlooked (after turing award)

soheil5• 2 years ago

Are you surprised every year that he's not included?

adamc• 2 years ago

This is just weird. Can the Nobel prize committee not find physics it wants to celebrate?

stroupwaffle• 2 years ago

I think one can consider what AI will bring to the field of physics. Merit is quite deserving of math and science of building tools which will unlock potential discoveries from here into the future.

Despite all of the talk surrounding AI in the workforce/business world, I think it is actually most important in science.

gauge_field• 2 years ago

But, this is more of a applied math than physics. There are many other scientist that contributed more towards understanding of quantum systems, e.g. Aharonov.

Also, as a tool, it has not been as useful as influential as they make it out to be, at least less influential than the work Aharonov in terms of increasing our understanding

dr_dshiv• 2 years ago

Did Hinton win for the restricted Boltzmann machine? I believe Paul Smolensky has some priority with the Harmonium, but Hinton certainly deserves it. But worth reading Smolensky’s paper, it is a classic!! https://stanford.edu/~jlmcc/papers/PDP/Volume%201/Chap6_PDP8...

everybodyknows• 2 years ago

I don't see a date in the PDF. When was it written?

ilya_m2• 2 years ago

It's a chapter from here: Rumelhart, D. E., McClelland, J. L., & the PDP research group. (1986). Parallel distributed processing: Explorations in the microstructure of cognition. Volume I. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

dcuthbertson• 2 years ago

Another version of that paper [0] is dated Feb. 1986.

[0] https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA620727.pdf

ngcc_hk5• 2 years ago

Not really related to physics per sec, but to let physicist to get out of research in physics. The most self-denial award ever. But machine learning deserve a prize. Just this … anyway congratulations

hillsboroughman2• 2 years ago

I wonder if they ever gave a Physics Nobel to a person who held a patent! People like Graham Bell never got recognized by the Nobel people. I get the impression that Physics Nobel prizes were more or less given only to University professors. They didnt seem to particularly care for people with grease on their hands

tombert5• 2 years ago

I don't really know what I'm talking about, but weren't there like 9 Nobel prizes awarded to Bell Labs engineers for physics? One of which (I think) being the invention of the transistor, which presumably had a patent.

hillsboroughman2• 2 years ago

You make several good points. However I'm not sure if Bell Labs people were different from university people in terms of their academic background. All three, Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain were Physics PhDs, two of them from elite universities. I was trying to say that brilliant engineers do not disproportionately figure in the list of Physics Nobel prize. In fact they are hardly to be seen.

dotnet003• 2 years ago

A post from yesterday, complaining about Musk not receiving a prize despite (according to the author of that post) deserving it, has had me thinking about that too. Folks like Bell, Musk, Bezos etc are in many ways similar to Alfred Nobel, highly successful and very controversial businessmen, where their contributions to the world have had great positives and great negatives.

Putting aside the fact that it's also entirely reasonable to say that Musk, Bezos etc, while having changed the world, have not really personally made breakthroughs in fundamental science of the level as to deserve a Nobel prize; I wonder if the Nobel Foundation avoids figures like that because of the parallels.

anonyfox• 2 years ago

Currently I'd flat out refuse to give any sort of prize to musk, that could be a tipping point for his mental "stability" completely breaking down. The last few years really had a toll on him. Fallen from idol to conspiracy rightwing idiot crashing his companies more and more.

T-A4• 2 years ago

"Nakamura holds 208 US utility patents as of 5 May 2020" [1]

He's also a professor though, so maybe that doesn't meet your criteria.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuji_Nakamura

henrikschroder4• 2 years ago

Philipp Lenard had a patent on cathode ray tubes, Marconi on wireless telegraphy, Dalén had plenty of patents on the automatic lighthouse regulator he got the prize for, and many others.

You can continue looking yourself: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/lists/all-nobel-prizes-in-...

Or maybe you can ask ChatGPT for a better summary?

divyaranjan1905• 2 years ago

Hinton has no published books on physics, and his bibliography of papers, to the extent I've examined, lacks any serious contributions to physics. There are underrepresented physicists who never will come close to winning a Nobel. Not to speak of the women in Physics, and the fact that we still have Edward Witten who still isn't worthy of winning a Nobel. As someone who has seen friends and others give up on physics due to being denied for funding and other institutional issues, I am infuriated at this gesture by the Nobel Committee.

When was the last time we gave someone a Nobel physics who hasn't bothered writing a book? We have professors dying without a tint of recognition for their work. The whole ordeal is terrible, it's like giving Einstein a Nobel in medicine because his research on photoelectric effect has opened a new domain in biotechnology and because that's the new cool thing in the market, we'll go with that.

A lot of the outsiders think "physics is dead", but dare they look into the research inside it. It is not at all dead. And arguing that failing to have definitive answers to the Big questions means being 'dead' is a terrible way to look at the field. Math still doesn't have a definite way to look at primes, for centuries we didn't have the definite way to look at algebraic equations of higher degrees and general solutions to them. That didn't make math die, that's what keeps it alive. I am fine with Hoppfield for once maybe, but seriously why Hinton?

amai6• 2 years ago

Nobody predicted that:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/1f94660/2024_nobel...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/1fydwg3/prediction...

Eliezer• 2 years ago

THAT will help. Thank you to the Nobel Prize committee for this choice.

kspacewalk2• 2 years ago

I suppose LeCun and Bengio are way too young for a Nobel prize these days[0]

[0] https://www.ageing.ox.ac.uk/images/fig01.jpeg

Chabsff• 2 years ago

No, these are the proper laureates (for that topic anyways, whether the topic is appropriate in the first place is another matter). LeCun and Bengio's works are undoubtedly immensely impactful, but there's no denying that they are standing on shoulders of giants.

scarmig6• 2 years ago

Schmidhuber enters the room and has lots of things to say.

queuebert• 2 years ago

That is a really strange plot. It looks like they are fitting a really high order polynomial to what is more or less a linear or maybe quadratic trend. And the overfitting exaggerates the recent trend.

trashtester3• 2 years ago

My guess is that Ilya would be more likely to get it at some point in the future than the two of them combined.

seydor6• 2 years ago

It will certainly be an interesting acceptance speech by Hinton

FrustratedMonky7• 2 years ago

What if I were to tell you that Physics included more than Theoretical Particles?

Are experimental Physicist just Engineers?

Are String Theorists just Mathematicians?

Is John von Neumann not a Physicist because he also worked with Computers?

Awful lot of nit-picking in this thread.

rramadass3• 2 years ago

No; The Nobel Committee has done a complete error in judgement with this.

These are Mathematics/CS techniques and nothing whatever to do with core Theoretical/Experimental Physics notwithstanding that they may have been inspired from Physics. There are plenty of Physics Researchers toiling away at real hard problems of the Physical World and instead of recognizing them the Committee has gone with "market fads" which themselves were only realizable due to Hardware advances at scale over the past decade. With this award they have disheartened and demotivated all true Physics Researchers which is a huge disservice to the Hard Science Community.

This is not to say that AI/ML researchers/community are not worthy of recognition. But they should not be folded under Physics rather a new category should have been created and they then awarded under it.

FrustratedMonky7• 2 years ago

I think there has now been enough crossover between Information Theory and Quantum Mechanics, that we can stop splitting hairs between "it's an algorithm on a computer, that isn't physics".

blululu2• 2 years ago

Physics is pretty old and it has always been about understanding the fundamental structure of reality. If it doesn’t tell you how it all goes round then it is not physics: plain and simple.

FrustratedMonky7• 2 years ago

Do physicists know the fundamental structure? They have some mathematical approximations that work for some measurements. They can make some predictions in some areas, but the same approximations break down in other areas. So the fundamentals aren't 'known'.

Some think measurements is engineering. So are the physicist that focus on building an apparatus to measure a theory, they are engineers? So only the theoretical people doing math are physicist? Even thought at that point they are only doing math?

Is Information Theory and Entropy a Computer Science subject or a Physics subject?

slashdave5• 2 years ago

Are String Theorists just Mathematicians?

Umm... well

molli• 2 years ago

Hinton: Studied psychology, became cognitive scientist.

Schmidhuber: Studied cs and math, developed algorithmic theory of the computable universe.

Hinton wins Nobel price in physics.

ChrisArchitect• 2 years ago

Was just listening to a live radio interview with Hinton finding him in a small hotel room in California somewhere quite flabbergasted at the news. Interviewer all happy for him etc, but when delving more into what it was for he started to go off on AI concerns etc and the interview didn't last much longer.

Acceptance speech might be something.

scarmig6• 2 years ago

Hoping he speaks a lot of truth to power.

hackernewds3• 2 years ago

The obsession could be taking over Hinton. Or perhaps guilt in Oppenheimer fashion

an_cap• 2 years ago

An excellent career retrospective by John Hopfield - https://pni.princeton.edu/sites/g/files/toruqf321/files/docu...

"As an Academy member I could publish such a paper without any review (this is no longer true, a sad commentary on aspects of science publishing and the promotion of originality)."

DrillShopper• 2 years ago

Yeah, fuck peer review!/s

ajkjk4• 2 years ago

Everyone's first thought when they read something is whatever the social norms say you're supposed to think (peer review = good, publishing without peer review = not science somehow?), but shouldn't you stop and wonder why the esteemed scientist wrote that line instead of just dismissing it? Otherwise you are only chiming in to enforce a norm that everyone already knows about, which is pointless.

One of the really refreshing things about reading older research is how there used to be all these papers which are just stray thoughts that this or that scientist had, sometimes just a few paragraphs of response to some other paper, or a random mathematical observation that might mean nothing. It feels very healthy. Of course there were far fewer scientists then; if this was allowed today it might be just too crowded to be useful; back then everyone mostly knew about everyone else and it was more based on reputation. But dang it must have been in a nice to have such an unrestricted flow of ideas.

Today the notion of a paper is that it is at least ostensibly "correct" and able to be used as a source of truth: cited in other papers, maybe referred to in policy or legal settings, etc. But it seems like this wasn't always the case, at least in physics and math which are the fields I've spent a lot of time on. From reading old papers you get the impression that they really used to be more about just sharing ideas, and that people wouldn't publish a bad paper because it would be embarrassing to do so, rather than because it was double- and triple-checked by reviewers.

naasking2• 2 years ago

Yes, but non-sarcastically.

kkylin2• 2 years ago

National Academy members still get to pick the reviewers (if they choose to go that route rather than regular submisssion), and the review is not blind. The reviews themselves are not public, but the identities of the reviewers are made public once the paper is out. So members can't just say whatever sh*t they want (and you can imagine some do), but still a highly unusual process.

kkylin2• 2 years ago

Too late now to edit my original comment, but I should have added that I was talking very specifically about the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (as was Hopfield).

bookofjoe• 2 years ago

Has there ever been a Nobel Prize whose basis is more threatening to HN core constituency?

andrenth• 2 years ago

I guess if it's not metaphysics then it's physics.

timonoko• 2 years ago

Why is that? I have video of Teuvo Kohonen explaining neural networks in 1985. "You can stack them" and "when a network has learned a skill, you can sell it as separate entity". What more you want?

https://youtu.be/Qy3h7kT3P5I?si=3Klgib0TaTbiG6dC&t=2477

ecosystem3• 2 years ago

Hopfield associate NNs was several years prior to 1985.

ecosystem3• 2 years ago

Hopfield made substantial contributions (Nobel-contention work) in multiple fields, which is truly astonishing: Kinetic proofreading (biochemistry/biophysics), HopNets (ML), long distance electron transfer (physics), and much more.

Welcome news that he finally got there.

cwiz2• 2 years ago

It seems physics is natural continuation for those who want understand what's behind the curtains after all. Thanks physicists for providing support for AI scientists. Next phase for joint research is quantum AI where one would need expertise in both physics and ML.

T-A4• 2 years ago

Old news:

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature23474

cwiz2• 2 years ago

There's a problem with collapsing states for back-propagation and the fact that quantum state can't be cloned which makes backdrop not usable there, but maybe something new will come up.

nextos3• 2 years ago

I find the prize a bit odd this time since it focused on Hopfield networks and Boltzmann machines. Picking those two architectures in particular seems a bit arbitrary. Besides, Parisi got the prize last year (edit: actually 2021, time flies) for spin glasses. Hopfield networks are quite related. They could have included Hopfield & Hinton too, and it would have looked more coherent.

It is also concerning that lately the Nobel Committee seems to be ignoring fundamental broad theoretical contributions. In this case, backpropagation, where Seppo Linnainmaa could have been one of the awardees. It is a bit sad he and others who have already passed away get little credit for something so fundamental.

whatshisface3• 2 years ago

The Nobel in Physics only goes with experimental discoveries, Peter Higgs didn't get his (deserved since the 70s) until the LHC directly observed the particle.

I agree that Hopfield networks and Boltzmann machines are a surprisingly arbitrary choices. It is like they wanted to give a prize to someone for neural networks, but had to pick people from inside their own field to represent the development, which limited the range of options. There is also the aspect of the physics community wanting to give somebody that they liked a Nobel, and then trying to fit them in. (The prize isn't handed out by a shadowy committee of Swedes, there's an involved and highly bureaucratic process for nomination that requires your colleagues to take up your case.)

nextos3• 2 years ago

But, as you said, Higgs got his prize once theories were tested. Hence, theoretical contributors (still alive as per prize rules) could have been included here as well.

dawnofdusk3• 2 years ago

Giorgio Parisi's prize proves the committee gives prizes for theoretical discoveries nowadays. This year's prize is more proof.

pfortuny• 2 years ago

Mmmmhhhhh… What about Penrose? Honest question.

graemep• 2 years ago

Nor did Georges Lemaître, nor other theorists, and in that case the experimental physicists who (accidentally!) discovered the evidence did win Nobels.

spullara2• 2 years ago

I've never heard that it had to be tied to experimental discoveries. For example, Feynman got the prize for Feynman diagrams, path integrals and QED calculations. None of that directly tied to experimental work.

It has definitely been awarded for both theoretical and experimental contributions throughout its history. Many theoretical physicists have received the prize for their conceptual breakthroughs, even without direct experimental verification at the time.

meekaaku• 2 years ago

And also why Einstein didnt get Nobel prize for his theories of relativity, but rather the 'discovery' of photoelectric effect.

wing_rets2• 2 years ago

Parisi won in 2021, not last year. His work was more about establishing spin glasses as a way to study complex systems. Hopfield definitely built on that, showing how those ideas could be applied to neural networks and info storage in state-space machines.

As for focusing on Hopfield networks and Boltzmann machines, I get where you're coming from. They’re just a couple of architectures among many, but they’re pretty foundational. They’re deeply rooted in statistical mechanics and have had a huge impact, finding applications across a range of fields beyond just machine learning.

nextos3• 2 years ago

Thanks, that's right, 2021 not 2023. Corrected.

adw3• 2 years ago

Hopfield networks and Boltzmann machines

Think of this as a Nobel prize for systems physics – essentially "creative application of statistical mechanics" – and it makes a lot more sense why you'd pick these two.

(I am a mineral physicist who now works in machine learning, and I absolutely think of the entire field as applied statistical mechanics; is that correct? Yes and no: it's a valid metaphor.)

alephnerd• 2 years ago

You ain't wrong.

Lots of ML is heavily influenced by fundamental research done by Physicists (eg. Boltzmann Machines), Linguists (eg. Optimality Theory / Paul Smolensky, Phylogenetic Trees/Stuart Russell+Tandy Warnow), Computational Biologists (eg. Phylogenetic Trees/Stuart Russell+Tandy Warnow), Electrical Engineers (eg. Claude Shannon), etc.

ML (and CS in general) is very interdisciplinary, and it annoys me that a lot of SWEs think they know more than other fields.

mportela• 2 years ago

Having studied control engineering, it feels like ML is control theory + optimization all the way down :)

I love how folks from different backgrounds can interpret it in so many ways.

cma2• 2 years ago

It is also concerning that lately the Nobel Committee seems to be ignoring fundamental broad theoretical contributions.

How lately? Einstein never got one for special and general relativity, for example.

avip3d• 2 years ago

Why does it fall under physics and not under mathematics?

uoaei4• 2 years ago

There is no Nobel Prize in Mathematics.

AceJohnny2• 2 years ago

the Nobel Prize doesn't do mathematics.

dredmorbius• 2 years ago

Further: the "Nobel equivalent" maths prize is the Fields Medal:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fields_Medal>

lucasban• 2 years ago

There isn’t a Nobel prize for mathematics. There is the Fields medal but it is different, and not handled by the same organization.

gweinberg• 2 years ago

True, but that's not a very good reason for giving a Nobel Prize in Physics to something that isn't physics. I think the standard way of giving a Nobel Prize to mathematicians is to call it economics.

dev1ycan• 2 years ago

You can't take this back, this literally just discredited the only nobel that actually mattered, great job discrediting the nobel.

uoaei4• 2 years ago

This is an appropriate application of this prize considering the adage that there are now three pillars to science, the third being simulation (after theory and experiment).

Also, many of the underlying theories in machine learning display deep analogy with physical laws we are already familiar with, e.g., thermodynamics.

Machine learning is much bigger than chatbots.

OneDonOne4• 2 years ago

What Nobel-worthy physical, chemical, or biological process has been solved/discovered in silico?

moralestapia2• 2 years ago

Hey!

the adage that there are now three pillars to science, the third being simulation (after theory and experiment)

Any specific place I could learn more about this? (aside from Google obv.)

I do simulation for a living, so that is mega-interesting to me.

what373736• 2 years ago

Finance, biology, CS, anything that uses vaguely statistical models and principles is fair game now?

I don’t hate physics, but if you stretch terms like that they tend to lose meaning.

gandalfgreybeer2• 2 years ago

Two of my research advisers whose dissertations in PhD Physics had Hopfield as their primary reference. I'm also a PhD candidate working on one right now (no longer my primary reference because of all the developments) but I can trace several of my main references back to them.

OneDonOne4• 2 years ago

What do computer programs have to do with physics?

hildolfr2• 2 years ago

I get the hoopla about why this shouldn't be in physics, but to answer your question: everything.

We like to act like it's a new abstraction entirely, but everything about code is predicated on physics and earlier associated works.

nilkn• 2 years ago

This must be frustrating to see for all the actual physicists out there. What work in physics got ignored so that a prize for AI could be shoehorned in?

I do think work on neural networks does rise to the level of a Nobel Prize. So I don't have any problem with this work getting such high-level recognition. But I really struggle with the physics classification and the side effect of omitting an award to physicists this cycle.

siva7• 2 years ago

Well, was there anything in physics more important than AI? No? See...

xvedejas• 2 years ago

It just makes one wonder, what is the point of categories of Nobel prizes? Should they instead hand out half a dozen or so prizes each year for whatever is most important to them?

pknomad2• 2 years ago

I was scratching my head but then it seems like the precedence for awarding Nobel prize for Physics for something that isn't "exclusively" physics has been set before.

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2018/summary/

Peter Shor also got an award (albeit non Nobel) for something that overlaps Physics with Math + CS.

https://news.mit.edu/2022/shor-spielman-breakthrough-prize-0...

To me, I'd rather see a Nobel Prize in Math/CS/IS but if I had to choose where these type of work would be shoehorned into existing Nobel prize category physics would be it.

ecosystem3• 2 years ago

That could be true for half the prize, but for the other half, Hopfield is part of undergraduate and graduate physics canon.

GaggiX• 2 years ago

Many of the actual physicists out there are ML researchers.

photochemsyn• 2 years ago

The distinctions between experimental-theoretical scientific disciplines are fairly arbitrary, e.g. where does one draw the line between physics and chemistry and biology? Mathematics is something of an exception but there's no Nobel for that, nor for astronomy, planetary science, etc.

The Nobels are grossly overrated and the idea that one can follow the most important scientific developments of the past century by just listing off the Nobel Prizes since 1905 is one best abandoned.

xcodevn• 2 years ago

Looking forward to Hinton receiving a Fields Medal for inventing backpropagation.

aithrowawaycomm• 2 years ago

This is sarcastic, right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seppo_Linnainmaa

xanderlewis3• 2 years ago

Is this a joke?

77pt775• 2 years ago

He's like 2 times the maximum allowed age.

I do get the sarcasm though.

Izikiel43• 2 years ago

Weird, this is what the Turing award is for

crmd• 2 years ago

I strongly suspect consciousness will be the next great paradigm in physics, following electrodynamics, quantum mechanics, and general relativity, now that the ‘detour’ of string theory is mostly behind us. Some, like Penrose, are already thinking about it but too late in their careers to make any breakthroughs.

Machine learning research is the logical entry point as the ‘particle physics’ of cognition and consciousness.

I think in retrospect we will say it was obvious why so many physics PhDs were working on ML during this era.

jhbadger3• 2 years ago

Of course there's another reason why physics PhDs are working on ML these days -- it's also the same reason so many of them are Wall Street quants.

dudu24• 2 years ago

I am a physicist working in ML and this is an absolutely bonkers comment lol

NalNezumi• 2 years ago

This feels.... Weird, It feels like Turing award exist for a reason and Hinton getting Nobel prise in physics is a stretch, unless you claim his contribution extend to things such as development of Alphafold.

In any case, I'm anticipating a long blog post from Schmidhuber about this soon.

sharadov• 2 years ago

Wouldn't ML and NN fall under the field of mathematics than physics?

pknerd• 2 years ago

eh..is it some kind of hallucination by "NobelGPT"?

kdavis• 2 years ago

As someone who has done lots of work in both fields, this is some BS.

WhitneyLand• 2 years ago

“In 1985 Hinton published a paper ‘How I Intend to Screw Over Physicists by Winning Their Nobel Prize’”

As expected iconoclast Sabine Hossenfelder is quick out of the gate with sarcasm and commentary on this one.

https://youtu.be/dR1ncz-Lozc?si=7kpntqwCzp0HLi02

bijant• 2 years ago

thank you for wasting 2 minutes of my time as I obviously looked for the paper in parallel to listening to the video XD

sidcool• 2 years ago

Can someone ELI5 what they did?

jmakov• 2 years ago

Wonder when Anna will get her share since she's making all this possible by making the articles and books available (Anna's archive).

mppm5• 2 years ago

It will be awarded jointly to Anna and Alexandra. "For incalculable contributions to all sciences".

chubot2• 2 years ago

I definitely think their work is deserving of awards, but I kinda agree with other commenters in that this says more about the Nobel committee than anything

i.e. Hinton has already won a Turing Award in 2018, and there is no Nobel for computer science

And this work was already recognized to have impact ~12 years ago, when he auctioned his company of 2 grad students to Google/Microsoft/Baidu/Facebook, for over $40M, ultimately going with Google [1]

---

i.e. IMO it feels a little late / weird / irrelevant to be giving this award in physics to machine learning research – it doesn’t feel like that would have happened without the news cycle

At least IMO the scientific awards are more interesting when they're leading indicators, not trailing ones -- when they are given by peers, acknowledging impact that may happen in the future.

Because it often takes decades to have impact, and it may occur after the researcher has passed away

---

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Genius-Makers-Mavericks-Brought-Faceb... - good book if you’re interested in how technology transfer happened in the last 10-15 years

whatshisface3• 2 years ago

IMO it feels a little late / weird / irrelevant
scientific awards are more interesting when leading indicators

Peter Higgs waited 50 years, the Nobel is not a "leading indicator." If it was, it would be given out on the basis of the "hype cycle," which would not be very helpful to anybody.

chubot2• 2 years ago

Well, it's possible to wait 50 years, and still NOT have realized the full impact of your work in society

Sometimes science/engineering turns out like that

e.g. I think Claude Shannon is like that -- his impact continues to rise, and he's viewed as more important after he died

He apparently never won a Turing Award or Nobel Prize, probably because there was and is no Nobel in computer science

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Shannon#Awards_and_hono...

So I guess I mean "drawing attention to something that would have not otherwise had attention", and based on the consensus of people working in the field

meepmorp2• 2 years ago

The Higgs boson was first detected in 2012 and he won the Nobel the following year. Saying he waited 50 years for the prize is a bit disingenuous.

hintymad• 2 years ago

Has NN led to any fundamental breakthrough in physics research? I understand the impact from NN to scientific research, but I'm not aware of any big results in fundamental physics research because of NN.

colmmacc• 2 years ago

It's not the Nobel Prize in Fundamental Physics though, and maybe this is correcting a bias that has been present for too long. Just because something isn't quantum or astronomical doesn't mean it's not physics.

Physics is the study of the physical world, and learning, imagination, creativity, are all phenomena that we observe in the physical world but have only a primitive understanding of. It's a staggering advancement that we can now simulate key aspects of each.

etiam8• 2 years ago

It seems like part of the motivation here is that it's possible to run many contemporary and planned very-big-science projects at all, since nobody's going to be sitting around analyzing centuries' worth of unvetted sensor data, but there are plenty of people prepared to spend a few years of their lives checking and massaging the regions of interest marked by a computer cluster.

The simplest cases will have been long enabled by simpler regressions and such, of course, but the more complex pattern recognition appears to be appreciated.

mikaeluman2• 2 years ago

I think this says more about the state of modern physics than anything else. Sad.

chx• 2 years ago

I posted https://hachyderm.io/@chx/113272153511607297

So they gave the Nobel Physics prize to AI bros before honoring another woman. Five women were ever honored so and 221 men.
This is your regular reminder Wikipedia refused an attempt to create a page for Donna Strickland with "This submission’s references do not show that the subject qualifies for a Wikipedia article" not half a year before she became a Nobel laureate. Katalin Kariko's page was not created until April 27, 2020.

#EverydaySexism #SystemicMisogyny

It got a decent amount of favs and retoots - and no angry responses. Now, when I posted this here, it got flagged.

That tells a hell lot about the people who visit the site. It's a great opportunity to check your own biases. That's why I am reposting it with this note.

AlbertCory• 2 years ago

Consider the Nobel in economics:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Econom...

It was not one of the original five, but it was endowed by a bank.

SO: you tech billionaires, why don't you endow a Prize in Computer Science? That would end the dispute about whether ML is "really" physics?

UncleOxidant• 2 years ago

Isn't backpropagation to train NNs the big innovation in this space? Neither of these guys invented that.

fsndz• 2 years ago

I think they look at the overall impact not just one single thing. a lot of people invented backpropagation independently but after that their impact was low. Hinton is like everywhere when you look at the state of machine learning now

infinite8s• 2 years ago

Hinton is only one of two people in history to win both the Nobel and the Turing award (Herbert Simon is the other, although he won the economics Nobel).

zulban• 2 years ago

Tinfoil hat: this is a scheme to stir up enough trouble that a Nobel prize for computer science is created.

rkp8000• 2 years ago

Here is a link to the press conference with Hopfield at Princeton University: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk3Ok1D1xR8

zeofig2• 2 years ago

Looks like the Nobel wants to fast track its march towards irrelevancy. What a joke.

I see a lot of people saying "physics has stalled" etc., which is not the case. It may be the case for high energy physics (I would not even make that statement myself with any confidence), but there is a lot of other physics being done.

mindcrime3• 2 years ago

Congratulations to Doctors Hopfield and Hinton! It's wonderful to see them both receiving such an esteemed prize, in recognition of the outstanding work they have both done.

reducesuffering• 2 years ago

Hinton: "Having the Nobel Prize could mean that people will take me more seriously."

Interviewer: "Take you more seriously when you warn of future dangers?"

Hinton: "Yes."

groos• 2 years ago

Well, the Academy did award the Peace Prize to Obama so this is not out of character.

i4k• 2 years ago

Is this the first time that the Physics Nobel Prize isn't awarded to physicists?

ClassyJacket2• 2 years ago

These people obviously did amazing work, but shouldn't a physics prize go to... physicists? It's not as if there aren't physicists doing active work. While the foundation can do whatever it wants, I do feel awards and prize categories should be honest.

Like if there weren't many good movies they wouldn't start giving the Oscar for Best Picture to a videogame.

lvlabguy• 2 years ago

As a former physicist with a PhD in experimental condensed matter physics, I would say that this is one of the dumbest things I have ever seen. I suspect COVID-19 made people collectively dumber.

JBiserkov• 2 years ago

Another salvo in the PR campaign to pump and dump AI stocks, or?

sashank_1509• 2 years ago

A lot of commentators here saying that while fundamental physics has possibly stalled, a lot of applied physics is still bustling with activity. Even buying that premise, is there anything in the applied physics fields that is comparable in impact to the neural network?

It feels like the Nobel committee’s decision is an indictment on the lack of impact of modern physics. They had to stretch definitions and go into AI, to get something that they found impactful enough for receiving a Nobel prize. This is impact outside of physics, impact on a broader societal sense that physics in the past had in spades and AI has now.

mppm5• 2 years ago

Even buying that premise, is there anything in the applied physics fields that is comparable in impact to the neural network?

Why does it have to be? It's a different field. You would not expect the Nobel in chemistry to be awarded to Linus Torvalds, impact or no impact.

And the connection to physics is beyond tenuous here. The toy neural networks they cite in the document, including the Boltzmann machine, have very little to do with the power of ANNs to learn complex patterns that made such a splash recently. That is basically what the Bitter Lesson is all about. The interesting stuff does not arise from clever theory, but from practical tinkering and loooooots of compute.

boxed2• 2 years ago

The blue LED. Nobel Prize in 2014.

bjornsing4• 2 years ago

EUV lithography? Probably has had a bigger impact on AI today than Hopfield networks and Boltzmann machines combined. And also: it’s actually physics.

rochak• 2 years ago

Hilarious to be honest

Ivovosk• 2 years ago

HN is the only place that helps laymen come to grips with information like this one. One need to read a lot of comments first and then jump to the link. Thanks guys/gals

zoobab• 2 years ago

AI is not Physics.

Borrible• 2 years ago

I asked ChatGPT o1-preview with cutt-off October 2023 and it was not enthusiastic about the idea and said medicine would be closer.

ChatGPT 40 wasn't keen about it either.

Perplexity.ai told me it is what it is, it's a great idea and it's fine with it.

what373736• 2 years ago

With their breakthroughs, that stand on the foundations of physical science

Uhm, no. This has negatively and retroactively impacted my appreciation of the award. If I were in academic CS I would have blatantly rejected it. This is ridiculous.

mppm5• 2 years ago

I know I'm going out on a limb here, but is it possible that the prize has been awarded sarcastically?

Like, let's survey what our PhD students plan to do next in their careers. Oh wow, 62% say they are going into... AI? Well damn, why don't we just give the Nobel Prize for that, if it's such a hot field in physics right now?

thatsadude• 2 years ago

I’m disappointed. Nobel price for neural network architects that failed the test of time..

tightbookkeeper2• 2 years ago

Even physics is getting into tech.

HH_GU• 2 years ago

DeepMind wins chemistry. ChatGTP wins physics. AI rules science.

soheil5• 2 years ago

Their basic structure has close similarities with spin models in statistical physics applied to magnetism or alloy theory.

Statistical physics itself is hardly real physics, I also like how they avoided the term computational physics, which is what it's commonly known as. I suppose that might have given it away too quickly.

Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]

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