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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]

#131

Post by _zamorano_ »

mjburgess wrote: post #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 s…

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

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

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

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

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

#132

Post by vasco »

crossroadsguy wrote: post #57
vichle wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

Like it or not, one of the reasons Obama got the award was his campaign promise of withdrawing from Iraq. Guess who actually did it?

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

#133

Post by [deleted] »

drpossum wrote: post #121
lr1970 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Fun historical fact: Claude Shannon did win the Noble prize https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Noble_Prize#Recipients

[deleted]

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

#134

Post by Ma8ee »

eigenket wrote: post #56
Ma8ee wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"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?

I 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.

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

#135

Post by drpossum »

elashri wrote: post #128
drpossum wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun historical fact: Claude Shannon did win the Noble prize https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Noble_Prize#Recipients

That's different local prize by the American society of civil engineers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Noble_Prize

Yes. That's the joke.

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

#137

Post by jampekka »

programjames wrote: post #42

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…

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

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

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

#139

Post by wslh »

jgrahamc wrote: post #11
drpossum wrote: post #5

I don't know if this is a travesty that they awarded the prize to work on non-physical systems to jump on a bandwagon or that there was nothing else obvious enough to the board in actual physics to give this to. If I was the awardee I'd consider declining just out of respect to the field.

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…

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