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Japanese scientists were pioneers of AI; they're being written out of history

YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago
Also see (9 days ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42264069 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42264069 If dang is watching I would like recommend the earlier article for the repost queue.
- etiam 2y ago
  Glad you managed to get it to wider attention, and thanks for the acknowledgement!
  - YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago
    Thanks for the original posting.
- rramadass 2y ago
  From the above linked post (the article is the same); Annotated History of Modern AI and Deep Learning - https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/deep-learning-history.html https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/deep-learning-history.html Pretty good and mentions a lot of folks i didn't know about.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago
    Thanks, I know the article. I thought it was interesting to see that you-again is not alone in attributing the progress of deep learning to Japanese and Finnish researchers who lack wider recognition.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
rfoo 2y ago
Anyone here still remember Chainer?
NoZZz 2y ago
[flagged]
logicchains 2y ago
Maybe Schmidhuber was onto something with his complaints that the modern AI community wasn't giving credit where credit was due?
LarsDu88 2y ago
I think a good analogue for this situation is that of the Nobel in Physics for the Blue LED. The first blue LED was built by Herb Maruska and Wally Rhines at Stanford in 1972. However it was incredibly dim. It took decades of focused and sustained research by Shuji Nakamura and others to make a commercially viable blue LED. Hence Nakamura won the Nobel Same deal with AI/ML. Although Nakamura was actually doing something PHYSICS related!
- bathtub365 2y ago
  So we can blame Shuji Nakamura for all blue LED’s being insanely bright?
  - LarsDu88 2y ago
    We can blame him for the 10x electricity savings for lighting we all enjoy now thanks to blue LEDs filling out the color spectrum for visible light
wslh 2y ago
If we go back in time the perceptron was invented in the 40s by Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts. The first hardware implementation was Mark I Perceptron machine built in the 50s [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptron
reader9274 2y ago
“We must not forget the role played by pioneer Japanese researchers in erecting the foundations of neural network research.” By awarding the Nobel to Hopfield and Hinton a lot of folks were "forgotten" but that's not the right way to look at a Nobel. You can't award everyone that ever contributed to such a large innovation through the century. It's about recognition and not forgetting, even when a narrow selection has to be made. Just enjoy the fact that your beautiful field was awarded such a prize and recognition it truly deserves.
29athrowaway 2y ago
Fukushima's work was itself inspired on the work of the neuroscientists Hubel and Wiesel. Science is a large network of contributions and collaboration.
stanfordkid 2y ago
Is back propagation really an idea applicable to the Nobel prize in physics? I mean certainly a Turing award is warranted. But back propagation or neural networks don’t really tell us anything about how the universe works. It’s an efficient optimization algorithm for a really powerful class of models.
- etiam 2y ago
  The 2024 Physics Prize is not being awarded for backpropagation but “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks”. They seem to be focusing on energy function, statistical mechanics connection, etc. of Hopfield Nets and Boltzmann machines. An auxiliary motivation seems to be the use of ANN:s becoming a significant tool for very-big-data physics. Nobel Foundation descriptions (from discussion at the announcement https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41775463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41775463 ): https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2024/09/advanced-physicsprize2024.pdf https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2024/09/advanced-physicsp... https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2024/summary/ https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2024/summary/
  - peterfirefly 2y ago
    > ANN:s You are from Sweden or Finland, right?
derbOac 2y ago
This is a good article. My impression is the way we think of scientific credit in general is broken. There's too much of an attempt to attribute credit to a small number of people. This might or might not have been more accurate at one time in history but it's increasingly a problematic schema for how to think about how science works. I don't mean that people who get credit don't deserve it, more so that there are often a series of people who also deserve it and don't get credit.
- hulitu 2y ago
  > often a series of people who also deserve it and don't get credit. This is normal. See "The lifecycle of a troubled project". The last step is "Dictinctions for the uninvolved".
- monkeyfun 2y ago
  Reminds me of a classic old IGN interview with Warren Spector. It goes: "There's a tendency among the press to attribute the creation of a game to a single person," says Warren Spector, creator of Thief and Deus Ex.

Also see (9 days ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42264069 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42264069 If dang is watching I would like recommend the earlier article for the repost queue.

etiam 2y ago
Glad you managed to get it to wider attention, and thanks for the acknowledgement!
- YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago
  Thanks for the original posting.
rramadass 2y ago
From the above linked post (the article is the same); Annotated History of Modern AI and Deep Learning - https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/deep-learning-history.html https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/deep-learning-history.html Pretty good and mentions a lot of folks i didn't know about.
- YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago
  Thanks, I know the article. I thought it was interesting to see that you-again is not alone in attributing the progress of deep learning to Japanese and Finnish researchers who lack wider recognition.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

rfoo 2y ago

Anyone here still remember Chainer?

NoZZz 2y ago

[flagged]

logicchains 2y ago

Maybe Schmidhuber was onto something with his complaints that the modern AI community wasn't giving credit where credit was due?

LarsDu88 2y ago

I think a good analogue for this situation is that of the Nobel in Physics for the Blue LED. The first blue LED was built by Herb Maruska and Wally Rhines at Stanford in 1972. However it was incredibly dim. It took decades of focused and sustained research by Shuji Nakamura and others to make a commercially viable blue LED. Hence Nakamura won the Nobel Same deal with AI/ML. Although Nakamura was actually doing something PHYSICS related!

bathtub365 2y ago
So we can blame Shuji Nakamura for all blue LED’s being insanely bright?
- LarsDu88 2y ago
  We can blame him for the 10x electricity savings for lighting we all enjoy now thanks to blue LEDs filling out the color spectrum for visible light

wslh 2y ago

If we go back in time the perceptron was invented in the 40s by Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts. The first hardware implementation was Mark I Perceptron machine built in the 50s [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptron

reader9274 2y ago

“We must not forget the role played by pioneer Japanese researchers in erecting the foundations of neural network research.” By awarding the Nobel to Hopfield and Hinton a lot of folks were "forgotten" but that's not the right way to look at a Nobel. You can't award everyone that ever contributed to such a large innovation through the century. It's about recognition and not forgetting, even when a narrow selection has to be made. Just enjoy the fact that your beautiful field was awarded such a prize and recognition it truly deserves.

29athrowaway 2y ago

Fukushima's work was itself inspired on the work of the neuroscientists Hubel and Wiesel. Science is a large network of contributions and collaboration.

stanfordkid 2y ago

Is back propagation really an idea applicable to the Nobel prize in physics? I mean certainly a Turing award is warranted. But back propagation or neural networks don’t really tell us anything about how the universe works. It’s an efficient optimization algorithm for a really powerful class of models.

etiam 2y ago
The 2024 Physics Prize is not being awarded for backpropagation but “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks”. They seem to be focusing on energy function, statistical mechanics connection, etc. of Hopfield Nets and Boltzmann machines. An auxiliary motivation seems to be the use of ANN:s becoming a significant tool for very-big-data physics. Nobel Foundation descriptions (from discussion at the announcement https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41775463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41775463 ): https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2024/09/advanced-physicsprize2024.pdf https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2024/09/advanced-physicsp... https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2024/summary/ https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2024/summary/
- peterfirefly 2y ago
  > ANN:s You are from Sweden or Finland, right?

derbOac 2y ago

This is a good article. My impression is the way we think of scientific credit in general is broken. There's too much of an attempt to attribute credit to a small number of people. This might or might not have been more accurate at one time in history but it's increasingly a problematic schema for how to think about how science works. I don't mean that people who get credit don't deserve it, more so that there are often a series of people who also deserve it and don't get credit.

hulitu 2y ago
> often a series of people who also deserve it and don't get credit. This is normal. See "The lifecycle of a troubled project". The last step is "Dictinctions for the uninvolved".
monkeyfun 2y ago
Reminds me of a classic old IGN interview with Warren Spector. It goes: "There's a tendency among the press to attribute the creation of a game to a single person," says Warren Spector, creator of Thief and Deus Ex.