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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]

#151

Post by jay-barronville »

simiones wrote: post #96
vichle wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In addition to the other replies, he is the only US president in modern history to explicitly authorize the assassination of a US citizen without a trial, and create a legal doctrine allowing future presidents to do so; and he was the major escalator of the use of drone strikes in war (the practice started with Bush, but it expanded many fold under Obama).

> […] [Obama] is the only US president in modern history to explicitly authorize the assassination of a US citizen without a trial

Just one of the many things Obama did that upsets me so much. The precedent he set with that is criminal.

Of course I’m against terrorism, but our government MUST NOT have the right to classify Americans as terrorists and just execute them without a trial—via drone strikes!

Most Americans likely don’t even know about what happened to the al-Awlaki’s, which is unfortunate.

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

#152

Post by hoseja »

openrisk wrote: post #115
huijzer wrote: post #69

In 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.

> 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.

As evidenced by the search for room temperature low pressure superconductors.

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

#153

Post by cubefox »

amelius wrote: post #78
elashri wrote: 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.

Someone changed the Wikipedia article today to call Hopfield a "physicist". Previously the article called him simply a scientist, because his main work wasn't limited to physics. I changed it back now, let's see if it holds up.

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

#154

Post by wodenokoto »

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…

And who are the Oscar’s to give out awards to movies?

You can hand out the MJBurgess awards for non-NN-related physics today!

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

#155

Post by weinzierl »

aquafox wrote: post #6

"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…

At least the somewhat free interpretation of field boundaries is nothing new. The physicist Rutherford ("All science is either Physics or stamp collecting")[1] won the Chemistry Nobel Prize.

Influence and consideration of the Zeitgeist is also nothing new. Einstein got his prize for the discovery of the Photoelectric Effect and not Relativity.

[1] I know that some people have interpreted this quote in favor of the other sciences but I think that is far fetched.

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

#156

Post by jampekka »

meindnoch wrote: post #125
amelius wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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.

TBF 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.

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

#157

Post by programjames »

meindnoch wrote: post #125
amelius wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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.

> All the math and CS needed for AI can fit on a napkin, and had been known for 200+ years.

This isn't really true. If you read a physics textbook from the early 1900s, they didn't really have multivariate calculus and linear algebra expressed as concisely as we do now. It would take several napkins. Plus, statistical mechanics was quite rudimentary, which is important for probability theory.

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

#159

Post by sph »

acoupleofts wrote: post #148
Arkhaine_kupo wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 diplomac…

> The least amount of wars in any century since WW2 :/

We still have a decade or so to get back to average

Also, WW2 being so utterly destructive, back to back after an arguably even worse global war, skews the stats a little.

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

#160

Post by oefrha »

cfcf14 wrote: post #29

So uh, things are not looking so good for actual physics these days, I gather?

Former 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.
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