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

nobelprize.org

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

#81
Since most papers nowadays are written by AI, and peer reviewed by AI, it only seemed logical for AI to be used by the Nobel committee to award the godfather of AI.

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

Hopefully AI will have an answer soon.

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

#82

[flagged]

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

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

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

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

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

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tangential to your question but not the premise of this subthread/post - he became president in Feb 2009 and got the award in October. I don't think he started any new wars, but he inherited some and continued. Anyway, the point here should be the absurdity of a lot of Nobel awards and that stands - especially in his case. I mean Trump was nominated for the award for fuck's sake! More than 2 or 3 times iirc. So anywa…

The Nobel peace prize is awarded by a different institution than the science ones. And there are hundreds of people that can nominate, doesn't mean that a nomination reflects anything upon the committee that awards the prize.

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

#85
I've always sided with Feynman on this, and this proves him right: wtf do these people think they are appointing themselves fit to hand out trinkets and baubles on behalf of global scientific achievement?

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

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

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

#86
post #78
post #66

As a physicist, my reaction to this is how bizarre is that. Maybe he deserves a nobel prize but in physics? Also arguing that NN is used in physics so we can argue nobel prize is okay is like asking for Stephan Wolfram to be awarded Nobel prize for Mathematica which is much more used in physics as a tool. And he is a physicist and had contributions to the field of numerical relativity (The reason he created Mathemati…

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

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

#88
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

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

#89
This does indeed smell of desperation. Which is really, really sad. Advances in _real_ physics are central to the absolutely needed sustainability transition. In a sane society that values its self-preservation you would not need to grasp at second-order straws to justify the need for all sorts of both fundamental and applied physics research.

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

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

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

#90

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

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