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Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]
- jeffwass 2y agoAs a former physicist (PhD in Experimental condensed matter physics), I have to ask WTF? I get the importance of AI development, but Physics?
- tmelm 2y agoI'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 2y agoYeah I was wondering the same, I get that this was fundamental work, but how was this strongly tied to physics?
- tempusalaria 2y agoWhat 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.
- jampekka 2y agoHinton 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.
- kgwgk 2y agoAt least they already recognized actual spin-glasses research in physics in 2021. That makes this award for this by-product more puzzling though.
- karmasimida 2y agoBoltzmann 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.
- adastra22 2y agoOr Obama’s peace prize.
- manquer 2y agoIt 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
- adastra22 2y agoObama’s and Kissinger’s prizes are both disastrous for entirely different reasons. And I don’t mean anything partisan by that. Kissinger was awarded a peace prize for achieving a cease fire in the Vietnam war … a war in which he’d personally been responsible for some of the worst and most illegal excesses. Obama was awarded the peace prize for literally nothing. It was anticipatory, meant to urge him towards ending American wars in the Middle East (he escalated instead). The Nobel committee gets it wrong looking both forwards and backwards.
- manquer 2y agoIt is less about on what reasons made them poor laureates specifically and more important on what is wrong with the process itself Unless the process of selection of the committee (unqualified, political) and process of selection of the winner(opaque and inconsistent criteria) is fixed we will have poor candidates winning it in the future too Unlike the economic prize peace was one that Alfred Noble actually wanted himself to be an award given too. One could also argue peace prize should be the most important of them all. Noble wished to mitigate the military application of his invention, the peace prize should be achieving that most. The continued poor judgment of the parliament in selecting the committee and the committee in selecting winners devalues the prize for future winners and devalues the good work the Swedish institutions have put in making it the premier award in their fields
- BeetleB 2y 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...
- hermitcrab 2y agoI agree. I don't see how this is physics in any accepted sense of the word.
- quaxi 2y agoWhen 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.
- hermitcrab 2y agoIt's not clear to me that we have "made sand think like a human" (yet).
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jeanlucas 2y agoAwesome. > They trained artificial neural networks using physics Here's from Nobel Prize official website: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2024/press-release/ https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2024/press-release...
- drpossum 2y agoI 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 2y agoThe 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."
- drpossum 2y agoThen 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.
- eigenket 2y agoHe unironically should
- volkadav 2y ago100% agreed as I can't think of any one individual since(1) who has done as much for all of science and engineering as he ultimately did; alas, they are not awarded posthumously. (1) Newton would be a strong contender on a "for all time" basis, but even he would've probably needed to share it with Leibniz, which would have driven him absolutely ~b o n k e r s~, like wet hornet in a hot outhouse mad, LOL.
- 2y ago
- aquafox 2y 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_?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- vasco 2y agoEverything in the universe is a tool from physics - taps head smugly.
- rurban 2y agoEverything is either mathemetics or stamp-collecting (ie social sciences). Physics and chemistry are just applications of mathematics.
- mglz 2y agoHm, 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?)
- mjburgess 2y agoThey dont have to give them a nobel prize. They have not advanced any of those areas.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dietr1ch 2y agoI think that you can grow mathematics through applied mathematics. It's something that grows the domain where Mathematics is useful, even though the maths themselves where known and somewhat well understood in a more abstract way. Considering this, it feels odd not to allow a similar thing to happen on physics.
- hoseja 2y agoSweden Yes!
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- isaacfrond 2y agoPhysics Nobel prize now also covers computer science, I guess.
- programjames 2y agoMeh, neuroscience.
- what37373 2y agoNo relation to neuroscience whatsoever.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- sega_sai 2y agoPhysicist here. I'm sure Hinton deserves some sort of prize, but in Physics is really bizarre.
- jampekka 2y agoHe did get the Turing award already in 2018.
- Ma8ee 2y agoI 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.
- noobermin 2y agoString theory and the foundations are not the only area of physics. It would be nice for theorists to remember that.
- mppm 2y agoIt 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.
- Ma8ee 2y agoCould 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.
- eigenket 2y ago"Vital" is completely subjective but I'd throw stuff around quantum information into the ring. Maybe you'd consider the loop-hole free Bell tests performed in 2015 and awarded the 2022 Nobel prize to count?
- Ma8ee 2y agoI think the prize in 2022 was a nice prize, but it could still be considering just tidying the corners. In the end it just proved that things really work as most of us has thought it worked for decades.
- 2y ago
- pvitz 2y agoNext year, the creators of Excel will get the prize, because it is an implementation of the mathematical universe.
- passwordoops 2y agoYou know what, I can support this for its predecessor, Lotus123. If ANNs are worthy of the prize in physics, then so is this
- jhbadger 2y agoVisiCalc, surely. Lotus 123, much like Excel, was just following in the footsteps of the original spreadsheet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisiCalc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisiCalc
- ngcc_hk 2y agoThis practical idea of spreadsheet has much more impact to society than many innovation. Nobel prize worthy.
- nickpsecurity 2y agoThe Nobel Prize dates and finances are probably each implemented in one, too.
- incognition 2y agoVbasic is Turing complete hah
- logicchains 2y agoImagine how Schmidhuber's feeling right now.
- cubefox 2y agoI'm sure he writes an article pointing all the errors in the official justification for the prize.
- bobosha 2y agohaha!
- throwaway2562 2y agoAlas, poor Jurgen! I knew him, Horatio. A fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy…
- beautifulfreak 2y agoreference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%BCrgen_Schmidhuber#Credit_disputes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%BCrgen_Schmidhuber#Credit...
- versteegen 2y agoThat was my almost immediate reaction to the headline! Rarely credited but rarely forgotten.
- sva_ 2y agoHas anyone else won a Turing award as well as the Nobel prize in physics?
- protoman3000 2y agoThis is not physics. Does that mean there was no Nobel Price worthy research happening in the field of physics?
- Urahandystar 2y ago[flagged]
- vichle 2y agoCould you elaborate, which wars did he start? (honest question)
- ulkram 2y 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/ https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-na-pol-obama-at-war/
- vichle 2y agoTechnically not the same thing but ironic/hypocritical nonetheless.
- medo-bear 2y agonah no way. i thought obama kool https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zmIUm1E4OcI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zmIUm1E4OcI so you can arguably add ukraine crisis to that list
- sekai 2y 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/ https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-na-pol-obama-at-war/ A bit different from "started a war".
- mardifoufs 2y agoIf someone launched an airstrike against the continental US, what exactly would that mean?
- YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago
- bogtog 2y agoI wonder if this'll help physics PhDs get industry jobs (I hear Myron Scholes is up for the 2025 prize)
- hellectronic 2y agoYou mean like the ones working on Wall Street?
- vasco 2y agoIf you google who Myron Scholes is you'll see the person you replied to made the same assertion already.
- aquafox 2y 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_?
- programjames 2y 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.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- cfcf14 2y agoSo uh, things are not looking so good for actual physics these days, I gather?
- sva_ 2y agoInteresting thought. I hear some voices saying theoretical physics is stuck with string theory, but am not really qualified to make a judgement.
- drpossum 2y agoPhysics 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".
- Animats 2y agoMuch of the experimental action in recent decades has been in low energy theoretical particle physics. Down near absolute zero, where quantum effects dominate and many of the stranger predictions of quantum mechanics can be observed directly. The Nobel Prizes in physics for 1996, 1997, 1998, 2001, and 2003 were all based on experimental work down near absolute zero.
- rty32 2y agoNobel prize was awarded to theoretical work in 2021: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2021/popular-information/ 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.
- oefrha 2y agoFormer 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.
- ghrqan 2y agoWhat 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.
- napa3uT 2y agothis is a painfully accurate description of how we feel we are treated(CERN physicists that is) are you an ex colleague or something :)
- jwilk 2y agoSee also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41775449 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41775449 (> 40 comments).
- kleiba 2y agoThis must piss Schmidhuber off like nothing else.
- raverbashing 2y agoTo the point of nuclear fusion even.
- karmakurtisaani 2y agoA very long and detailed blog post incoming. Spoiler alert: the Nobel prize should have been awarded to Gödel/Hilbert (and Schmidhuber).
- kleiba 2y agoIronically, he is cited in this article.
- ks2048 2y agoNext: 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 2y agoBob Dylan already won that prize to similar controversy.
- oefrha 2y agoNobel Prize in Literature has always been controversial. It seems that the Physics Prize is headed that way (it’s not just this year)…
- agomez314 2y agothis is the best comment
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- hnfong 2y agoI 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...
- karavelov 2y agoWaiting for Sabine's comment: "Told you so, physics is dead"
- varjag 2y agoNaturally she's not happy https://x.com/skdh/status/1843592351736050053 https://x.com/skdh/status/1843592351736050053
- lucaslucasluke 2y agoCould you copy and paste her post in here? I'm brazilian and our STF overlords have decided that we shall not access twitter anymore
- hnfong 2y agoThe other comment (sibling of the one you replied to) already quoted the entire tweet. (Yes it's short and snarky.)
- noobermin 2y ago" And the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics does not go to physics... " https://x.com/skdh/status/1843592351736050053 https://x.com/skdh/status/1843592351736050053
- noobermin 2y agoMay 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.
- drpossum 2y agoThere no Nobel category for computer science or mathematics. Related reading https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/24/why-isnt-there-a-nobel-prize-in-mathematics https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/24/why-isnt-there-a-...
- eigenket 2y agoComputer 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.
- dagw 2y agothey'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.
- nxobject 2y agoIt also lets you co-host the Ig Nobels, if that’s a more meaningful accomplishment to you.
- amai 2y agoHow about a "Nobel Memorial Prize in Computer Sciences" similar to the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Economic_Sciences https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Econ...
- programjames 2y agoThis 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 2y agoHad 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 2y agoCurious, would Peter Shor qualify? I struggle if his work is really just CS or enough physics to be in the discussion.
- jampekka 2y agoThere 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.
- jampekka 2y agoNeither 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.
- lr1970 2y agoHonestly, 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.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- RandomLensman 2y agoMaybe just scrap the categories and have set or prizes for whatever sort of advanced humanity the most?
- elashri 2y agoAs 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 2y agoIt 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.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- alkonaut 2y agoI think the Nobel prize doesn't want any scientific advance to fall outside the range of awards entirely.
- meindnoch 2y 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.
- jampekka 2y agoTBF backpropagation was introduced only in the 1970's, although in hindsight it's a quite trivial application of the chain rule. There were also plenty of "hacks" involved to make the networks scale such as dropout regularization, batch normalization, semi-linear activation functions (e.g. ReLU) and adaptive stochastic gradient descent methods. The maths for basic NNs is really simple but the practice of them is really messy.
- huijzer 2y agoIn 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.
- openrisk 2y 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.
- alwinaugustin 2y agoIt’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
- matsemann 2y agoIs 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.
- ClassyJacket 2y agoThat'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.
- henrikschroder 2y agoAlfred Nobel was the only donor, and his will spells out the rules: https://www.nobelprize.org/alfred-nobel/alfred-nobels-will/ https://www.nobelprize.org/alfred-nobel/alfred-nobels-will/ In 1968, the Nobel Foundation accepted a donation from the Swedish central bank to establish a prize in economy, but in hindsight that was a pretty bad idea, and the probability of them accepting future donations to establish prizes in other fields is very slim.
- boxed 2y agoThey STILL don't call it a nobel prize. That's something.
- amai 2y agoHow about a "Nobel Memorial Prize in Computer Sciences" similar to the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Economic_Sciences https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Econ...
- anonymousDan 2y agoWhat 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!
- napa3uT 2y agothanks the feeling is mutual since comp scientists sneer at physicists too, just for other reasons
- anonymousDan 2y agoReally? Why would comp scientists sneer at physicists?
- mrguyorama 2y agoThey write reeeeaaaaalllly bad code
- anonymousDan 2y agoHaha, very true!
- nabla9 2y agoMost 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 2y agoAlso double descent was discovered already by physicists in 80s-90s
- archmutant 2y agoIn curious what's the context for this?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- xqcgrek2 2y agoThe 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.
- parodysbird 2y 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.
- snitty 2y agoChemists everywhere are wondering where this furor has been for the forty years or so.
- nullhole 2y agoPhysicists stole the chemistry prize, now computer scientists are stealing the physics prize, I guess
- GistNoesis 2y agoSince 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-A 2y agoFor 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-physicsprize2024.pdf https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2024/09/advanced-physicsp...
- amai 2y agoInteresting. LeCun, Bengio, Schmidhuber and Hochreiter are (amongst others) also mentioned in this article.
- karmakurtisaani 2y agoEagerly waiting for Schmidhuber's comment on the prize.
- ricksunny 2y agoThanks 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.
- mjburgess 2y agoI'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_ 2y agoAltough 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 2y agoThe 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.
- aeonik 2y agoIf Physicists could split atoms with only their arms and legs with some safety equipment, I bet they would get paid even more than 3.5 million pound salary.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 2y ago[flagged]
- openrisk 2y agoThis 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
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- soheil 2y agoTotally 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive
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- DiogenesKynikos 2y agoThere'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_quanta 2y agoI can only think of major achievements in my (narrow) field of study. What do you think could have reasonably been awarded?
- DiogenesKynikos 2y agoThree 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.)
- xqcgrek2 2y agoExoplanet science is not physics, it's chemistry or planetary science. By your logic prizes to teams who send probes to the outer solar system planets could also be given prizes.
- bfmalky 2y agoOk, so under what logic does ML become physics?
- YeGoblynQueenne 2y agoWhat's "exoplanet science"? The above are applications of knowledge of physics to astrophysics, as far as I understand it. Certainly they sound more relevant to physics than neural networks.
- cosmic_quanta 2y ago
- krishnasangeeth 2y agoTuring award and now Nobel prize in physics, something which he would have never expected. What an amazing career!
- DiogenesKynikos 2y ago"The Nobel Prize for Stuff We Think is Cool."
- deepnet 2y agoAs 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 2y agoThe 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).
- meindnoch 2y agoBaffling. If this isn't a sign of a major crisis in physics, then I don't know what is.
- amai 2y agoPeak AI Hype! Winter is coming!
- rory_h_r 2y agoI like to imagine this is for the 80s AI hype and another one will come out in 40 years for ChatGPT.
- pyb 2y agoMaybe 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.
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- eleveriven 2y agoA profound moment where physics, neuroscience and artificial intelligence intersect.
- seydor 2y agovery little to do with neuroscience
- Separo 2y agoExcept 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_learning
- raincole 2y agostill, very little to do with neuroscience
- littlestymaar 2y agoIt was a source loose of inspiration for sure, but it still have nothing to do with neurosciences. “Neural” network are as close to actual nervous system as the “Democratic” Republic of Korea is to democracy.
- FrustratedMonky 2y agoWell, come on, not that far apart. When I see someone trying this hard to be smart I just hear "REEEEEEEEE" or "Well actually......"
- elcomet 2y agoYou're mistaken. The perceptron was invented by Rosenblatt, a psychologist. This field has deep roots in neuroscience.
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- eterevsky 2y agoTo 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
- moralestapia 2y agoBob Dylan on literature was another "hmm" one. Not against nor in favor, it was just an unexpected awardee.
- tycho-newman 2y agoBob Dylan is the Boomer poet laureate.
- raincole 2y agoWar criminials got Nobel prize in peace.
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- jvanderbot 2y agoWhich were you referring to?
- splintfrog89 2y agoReal 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 2y agoThis 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 https://github.com/milosgajdos/gopfield [2] https://cybernetist.com/2017/03/12/hopfield-networks-in-go/ https://cybernetist.com/2017/03/12/hopfield-networks-in-go/
- aborsy 2y agoTerrible. Hopfield networks nobody cares about, and few heard of?
- kwar13 2y agoIn physics...?
- splintfrog89 2y ago[dead]
- barrenko 2y agoWell, the easiest way to enter the ML field is to pivot from theoretical physics.
- VHRanger 2y agoGeoffrey Hinton wins the Nobel prize in physics for giving physics postdocs more reasonable job market options
- alsodumb 2y agoLol I almost choked laughing at this lmaoo
- holmesworcester 2y ago...than finance
- auntienomen 2y agoIt's been a generation since it was easy to go into finance from physics.
- EXHades 2y agolol,All for employment
- fnands 2y agoAnd 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.
- scarmig 2y agoThis 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...
- tgv 2y ago[flagged]
- tomrod 2y agoI don't think there is a take I can disagree with more strongly. New technology can always be used for good or bad. His work in ML sets the course for a better future in spite of the people who use it for ill, whether advertisers or warlords.
- tgv 2y ago> New technology can always be used for good or bad. Always? Like atomic bombs? > His work in ML sets the course for a better future That very much remains to be seen, isn't it? So far, the negatives outweigh the positives.
- tomrod 2y agoAtomic bombs are a product of atomic energy. So are atomic energy, cancer treatment, electron microscopes, etc. I disagree the negatives outweigh the positive. Spellcheck, Google maps traffic, and electricity distribution are three applications I've used this morning. We dont tend to think about the successful applications, instead focusing the solely negative use like adtech.
- tgv 2y ago> Atomic bombs are a product of atomic energy Not really. There's no need to extract Pu-239, and it's quite a step to actually do that and then build a device that can create a large yield. > Spellcheck I wrote (several) spell checkers 30 years ago. One of them might still be in use. It's not deep learning. > We dont tend to think about the successful applications That doesn't take away the negatives, and certainly doesn't outweigh them at this moment to warrant a Nobel prize. In physics.
- Separo 2y ago> His work is a net negative for the world. Bit early for this very Hacker News type blurt. Eg: Personalized medicine, predictive medicine, protein folding, climate modelling, smart grids, fraud detection, disaster response, food production modelling, etc.
- physicsguy 2y agoThis 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 2y agoBob Dylan got a Nobel prize in literature, which feels something like a precedence.
- ngcc_hk 2y agoThe 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.
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- Separo 2y agoWell maybe in time ML will help break through the high energy physics roadblocks.
- elashri 2y agoOne of the very early successful applications of ML was using neural network and other models in particle identification systems in particle physics experiments.
- moelf 2y agoit 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.
- seanhunter 2y agoI 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.
- moelf 2y ago>Einstein supposedly won for "especially his work on the photoelectric effect" rather than relativity. just adding to this, this is because relativity wasn't experimentally verified (i.e. not sure if it's reality) at the time.
- mr_mitm 2y agoAlso, the prize is about the greatest benefit to humankind according to Alfred Nobel, not the most impressive research. Arguably, the photoelectric effect fits that notion better than GR or any other of Einstein's research. Besides that, Einstein received the prize in 1921, whereas the Eddington experiment in 1919 generally counts as the first experimental verification of GR.
- chrsw 2y agoHinton was never going to win the Nobel Prize while working for Google, right?
- behnamoh 2y agoare you saying that's part of his reason to leave Google?
- chrsw 2y agoThat's my suspicion, yes.
- rvnx 2y agoThe age too, and the fact that Google lost prestige in AI over the years. It's the company that didn't see the potential of Transformers, and that presented a half-assed Bard when LLMs were already in production in other companies.
- behnamoh 2y agoBut Hinton was not in favor of LLMs anyway, he argued backprop is not what the brain does and that we should do better than these models. I'd say Google would be a great place for someone thinking like that.
- querez 2y agowhat makes you say/think that?
- chipdart 2y 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.
- chrsw 2y ago
- chronolitus 2y agoMoreso 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 2y agoThey are not under an obligation to award the prize. They could have just said "sorry, we can't think of anyone."
- mishaevtikhiev 2y agoMy 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".
- fooker 2y 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.
- hsuz 2y agoI'd rather they withhold the prize this year, if there isn't really anything interesting happening in physics.
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- worstspotgain 2y agoWhen 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 2y agoNice 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 2y agoThis 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 2y agoThen again, its just mathturbation, but standalone and it can pretend to have a theory of everything, so fits well into the field.
- amarcheschi 2y agoI 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)
- wslh 2y agoSincerely, I don't like a shadow cast over the Turing and Gödel prizes. These awards have long honored groundbreaking achievements in computing and logic.
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- throw_m239339 2y agoCongrats 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
- jvanderbot 2y agoI 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
- amarcheschi 2y agoKanellakis award too for theoretical cs https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Kanellakis_Award https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Kanellakis_Award
- seanhunter 2y agoI 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.html https://www.fields.utoronto.ca/aboutus/jcfields/fields_medal...
- nybsjytm 2y agoHinton was never in the running for a Fields medal since he never made a single contribution to the field of mathematics. His work is about empirical discoveries in CS.
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- astura 2y ago>What are computer scientists usually rewarded with? The Turing Award is considered by most to be the highest award in computer science.
- bjornsing 2y agoHonestly 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 2y agoI 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.
- bjornsing 2y agoNothing 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_lithography https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_ultraviolet_lithogra...
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- lagrange77 2y agoI'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 2y agoNow,it is also too late for Kohonen, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teuvo_Kohonen https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teuvo_Kohonen
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- tommysson 2y agoHow 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...)
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- randcraw 2y agoOnly three can win. Do those two deserve recognition more than Hopfield?
- quantum_state 2y agoFeynman 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 2y agoFeynman 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 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2209.00083 [2] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ipRvjS7q1DI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ipRvjS7q1DI
- drpossum 2y agoNone 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
- lyu07282 2y agoYeah he only accepted his because he thought it would be even more of a hassle not to, but it seems like he seriously considered rejecting it.
- elicash 2y agoThey were responding to a specific claim someone made about Feynman's views. It's a good contribution to these comments and highly relevant.
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- parodysbird 2y agohttps://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0370157319303643 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"
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- _visgean 2y agoWell they should have given it to the guy who discovered the famous equation e=mc2 + ai.. https://www.reddit.com/r/LinkedInLunatics/comments/13tbfqm/what/ https://www.reddit.com/r/LinkedInLunatics/comments/13tbfqm/w...
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- muratgozel 2y agoJust watched the nobel prize live stream, surprised by the topic, looks very engineering to me rather than physics, do algorithms make physics subsidiary?
- Anon84 2y agoBoth 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
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- adamnemecek 2y agoIt’s closely related to statistical mechanics.
- aDyslecticCrow 2y agoThe 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.
- andrepd 2y ago>The most important factor tends to be the positive impact on society Making it even more baffling that this won then
- choilive 2y agoIf you don't think machine learning and neural networks have made massive positive contributions to humanity then you are naive.
- DangitBobby 2y ago
- chriskanan 2y agoHere is the reasoning: https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2024/09/advanced-physicsprize2024.pdf 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.
- whizzter 2y agoHe 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 2y agoThen they shouldn't be trusted to give awards in an area they are not experts in.
- whizzter 2y agoThat would probably leave the prizes awarded in a very narrow field, also the prize is supposed to be given to the thing that has "conferred the greatest benefit to humankind". So in this case they picked something that might be viewed as only having a tangential connection to the field, but the impact has been so immense that they probably went outside their regular comfort zone (and how many prizes can we give for LHC work that really don't touch regular human lives in the foreseeable future anyhow?).
- bjoli 2y agoImpact is hard to quantify. There have been several occasions where someone who very well deserved a Nobel prize didn't get one. There are all kinds of reasons. Given he is mentioned in the reasoning he was probably considered. We can't know the reason he did not get the prize. I recently watched this quite video on the subject: https://youtu.be/zS7sJJB7BUI?feature=shared https://youtu.be/zS7sJJB7BUI?feature=shared and found it quite enjoyable.
- adamc 2y agoThis is just weird. Can the Nobel prize committee not find physics it wants to celebrate?
- stroupwaffle 2y agoI 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 2y agoBut, 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
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- dr_dshiv 2y agoDid 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_PDP86.pdf https://stanford.edu/~jlmcc/papers/PDP/Volume%201/Chap6_PDP8...
- everybodyknows 2y agoI don't see a date in the PDF. When was it written?
- ilya_m 2y agoIt'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.
- gen220 2y agoThe whole book is quite good, btw! And it looks cool on a bookshelf.
- dcuthbertson 2y agoAnother version of that paper [0] is dated Feb. 1986. [0]: https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA620727.pdf https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA620727.pdf
- ngcc_hk 2y agoNot 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
- hillsboroughman 2y agoI 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
- tombert 2y agoI 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.
- hillsboroughman 2y agoYou 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.
- dotnet00 2y agoA 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 2y agoCurrently 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.
- divyaranjan1905 2y agoHinton 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?
- amai 2y agoNobody predicted that: https://www.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/1f94660/2024_nobel_prize_for_physics_predictions/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/1f94660/2024_nobel... https://www.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/1fydwg3/predictions_for_this_years_nobel_prize/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/1fydwg3/prediction...
- Eliezer 2y agoTHAT will help. Thank you to the Nobel Prize committee for this choice.
- kspacewalk2 2y agoI 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 https://www.ageing.ox.ac.uk/images/fig01.jpeg
- Chabsff 2y agoNo, 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.
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- seydor 2y agoIt will certainly be an interesting acceptance speech by Hinton
- FrustratedMonky 2y agoWhat 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.
- rramadass 2y agoNo; 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.
- FrustratedMonky 2y agoI 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".
- rramadass 2y agoIt's not "splitting hairs" but a logical argument. When Pre-Scientific-Age "Natural Philosophy" was partitioned into "Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Mathematics" etc. there was an understanding of their boundaries (though technically there are none and everything could be argued to be just Physics) and the Nobel prizes were designed accordingly. Now of course we know better and it might be time to come up with something like "Nobel Prize for inter-disciplinary/cross-disciplinary achievements" with the disciplines listed out. So in this case it would mention Biology/Physics/Mathematics/CS.
- molli 2y agoHinton: Studied psychology, became cognitive scientist. Schmidhuber: Studied cs and math, developed algorithmic theory of the computable universe. Hinton wins Nobel price in physics.
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- ChrisArchitect 2y agoWas 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.
- scarmig 2y agoHoping he speaks a lot of truth to power.
- hackernewds 2y agoThe obsession could be taking over Hinton. Or perhaps guilt in Oppenheimer fashion
- an_cap 2y agoAn excellent career retrospective by John Hopfield - https://pni.princeton.edu/sites/g/files/toruqf321/files/documents/John%20Hopfield%20Now%20What%203_0.pdf 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 2y agoYeah, fuck peer review!/s
- ajkjk 2y agoEveryone'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.
- erinnh 2y ago
- bookofjoe 2y agoHas there ever been a Nobel Prize whose basis is more threatening to HN core constituency?
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- andrenth 2y agoI guess if it's not metaphysics then it's physics.
- timonoko 2y agoWhy 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 https://youtu.be/Qy3h7kT3P5I?si=3Klgib0TaTbiG6dC&t=2477
- ecosystem 2y agoHopfield associate NNs was several years prior to 1985.
- ecosystem 2y agoHopfield 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.
- cwiz 2y agoIt 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-A 2y agoOld news: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature23474 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature23474
- cwiz 2y agoThere'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.
- nextos 2y agoI 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.
- whatshisface 2y agoThe 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.)
- nextos 2y agoBut, 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.
- dawnofdusk 2y agoGiorgio Parisi's prize proves the committee gives prizes for theoretical discoveries nowadays. This year's prize is more proof.
- pfortuny 2y agoMmmmhhhhh… What about Penrose? Honest question.
- avip3d 2y agoWhy does it fall under physics and not under mathematics?
- uoaei 2y agoThere is no Nobel Prize in Mathematics.
- AceJohnny2 2y agothe Nobel Prize doesn't do mathematics.
- dredmorbius 2y agoFurther: the "Nobel equivalent" maths prize is the Fields Medal: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fields_Medal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fields_Medal>
- lucasban 2y agoThere isn’t a Nobel prize for mathematics. There is the Fields medal but it is different, and not handled by the same organization.
- gweinberg 2y agoTrue, 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 2y agoYou can't take this back, this literally just discredited the only nobel that actually mattered, great job discrediting the nobel.
- uoaei 2y agoThis 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.
- OneDonOne 2y agoWhat Nobel-worthy physical, chemical, or biological process has been solved/discovered in silico?
- moralestapia 2y agoHey! >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.
- uoaei 2y agoI heard it from a professor who was a researcher in magnetohydrodynamics, studying flows on and under the surface of the sun. I don't know where to read more unfortunately, I'm not sure where it'sbeen fleshed out as an ideology.
- what37373 2y agoFinance, 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.
- OneDonOne 2y agoWhat do computer programs have to do with physics?
- hildolfr 2y agoI 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 2y agoThis 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 2y agoWell, was there anything in physics more important than AI? No? See...
- xvedejas 2y agoIt 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?
- whatshisface 2y agoThe categories correspond to who's filling out the nomination paperwork, and voting. You might think of it as a "Nobel from physics," which only usually is a Nobel in physics.
- pknomad 2y agoNo deeper point other than the person who funded it thought these fields should be awarded and encouraged (econ is the exception).
- pknomad 2y agoI 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/ 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-0922 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.
- xcodevn 2y agoLooking forward to Hinton receiving a Fields Medal for inventing backpropagation.
- aithrowawaycomm 2y agoThis is sarcastic, right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seppo_Linnainmaa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seppo_Linnainmaa
- xanderlewis 2y agoIs this a joke?
- 77pt77 2y agoHe's like 2 times the maximum allowed age. I do get the sarcasm though.
- Izikiel43 2y agoWeird, this is what the Turing award is for
- go13 2y ago[dead]
- crmd 2y agoI 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.
- NalNezumi 2y agoThis 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.
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- sharadov 2y agoWouldn't ML and NN fall under the field of mathematics than physics?
- pknerd 2y agoeh..is it some kind of hallucination by "NobelGPT"?
- kdavis 2y agoAs someone who has done lots of work in both fields, this is some BS.
- WhitneyLand 2y 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 https://youtu.be/dR1ncz-Lozc?si=7kpntqwCzp0HLi02
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- bijant 2y agothank you for wasting 2 minutes of my time as I obviously looked for the paper in parallel to listening to the video XD
- sidcool 2y agoCan someone ELI5 what they did?
- jmakov 2y agoWonder when Anna will get her share since she's making all this possible by making the articles and books available (Anna's archive).
- mppm 2y agoIt will be awarded jointly to Anna and Alexandra. "For incalculable contributions to all sciences".
- chubot 2y agoI 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-Facebook/dp/1524742678 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
- whatshisface 2y 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.
- chubot 2y agoWell, 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_honors_list 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
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- hintymad 2y agoHas 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 2y agoIt'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.
- etiam 2y agoIt 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.
- carlysagan 2y ago[dead]
- OhMeadhbh 2y ago[flagged]
- mikaeluman 2y agoI think this says more about the state of modern physics than anything else. Sad.
- chx 2y agoI posted https://hachyderm.io/@chx/113272153511607297 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 2y agoConsider the Nobel in economics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Economic_Sciences 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 2y agoIsn't backpropagation to train NNs the big innovation in this space? Neither of these guys invented that.
- fsndz 2y agoI 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 2y agoHinton 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 2y agoTinfoil hat: this is a scheme to stir up enough trouble that a Nobel prize for computer science is created.
- rkp8000 2y agoHere is a link to the press conference with Hopfield at Princeton University: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk3Ok1D1xR8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk3Ok1D1xR8
- zeofig 2y agoLooks 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.
- mindcrime 2y agoCongratulations 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 2y agoHinton: "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 2y agoWell, the Academy did award the Peace Prize to Obama so this is not out of character.
- i4k 2y agoIs this the first time that the Physics Nobel Prize isn't awarded to physicists?
- ClassyJacket 2y agoThese 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 2y agoAs 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 2y agoAnother salvo in the PR campaign to pump and dump AI stocks, or?
- sashank_1509 2y agoA 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.
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- mppm 2y 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.
- boxed 2y agoThe blue LED. Nobel Prize in 2014.
- bjornsing 2y agoEUV lithography? Probably has had a bigger impact on AI today than Hopfield networks and Boltzmann machines combined. And also: it’s actually physics.
- Ivovosk 2y agoHN 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
- rochak 2y agoHilarious to be honest
- zoobab 2y agoAI is not Physics.
- Borrible 2y agoI 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.
- what37373 2y 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.
- mppm 2y agoI 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 2y agoI’m disappointed. Nobel price for neural network architects that failed the test of time..
- tightbookkeeper 2y agoEven physics is getting into tech.
- HH_GU 2y agoDeepMind wins chemistry. ChatGTP wins physics. AI rules science.
- soheil 2y 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.