Has anyone else won a Turing award as well as the Nobel prize in physics?
Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]
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Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]
#22I 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.
The linked document connects their work to physics as follows: "The Hopfeld network utilises physics that describes a material’s characteristics due to its atomic spin – a property that makes each atom a tiny magnet. The network as a whole is described in a manner equivalent to the energy in the spin system found in physics, and is trained by fnding values for the connections between the nodes so that the saved image…
Then it should be awarded for the result.
Given the line of reasoning this has now opened up Alan Turing should be awarded one posthumously in every field.
Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]
#23As a former physicist (PhD in Experimental condensed matter physics), I have to ask WTF? I get the importance of AI development, but Physics?
Yeah I was wondering the same, I get that this was fundamental work, but how was this strongly tied to physics?
Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]
#24This is not physics. Does that mean there was no Nobel Price worthy research happening in the field of physics?
Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]
#25[flagged]
Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]
#26I wonder if this'll help physics PhDs get industry jobs (I hear Myron Scholes is up for the 2025 prize)
Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]
#27"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_?
Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]
#28What 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.
Hinton did introduce the Boltzmann machine networks that kind of resemble thermodynamics if you squint really hard. And those didn't really pan out. Of course the price is really for MLP backpropagation (or how it found applications) but I guess it's not physics enough. Hopfield networks never really found use either, but they are sort of related to Ising models and NNs, so I guess it's physics then.
At least they already recognized actual spin-glasses research in physics in 2021. That makes this award for this by-product more puzzling though.
Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]
#29So uh, things are not looking so good for actual physics these days, I gather?
Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]
#30What 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.