201–210 of 876 posts
It’s time to consider adding computer science as a category for the Nobel Prize. They have already been awarded prizes for economic sciences and peace, so why not computer science? It's not the same as physics, and its impact on modern life is undeniable
This must piss Schmidhuber off like nothing else.
A profound moment where physics, neuroscience and artificial intelligence intersect.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 real…
[1] https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...
To be fair, Nobel Prize has a history of expanding the traditional bounds of respective fields when awarding the prizes: Bertrand Russel got the Nobel prize in literature Daniel Kahneman got Nobel in economics
Most commenters here don't know that Boltzmann machines and associative memories existed in condensed matter physics long before they were used in cognitive science or AI. The Sherrington–Kirkpatrick model of spin glass is a Hopfield network with random initialization. Boltzmann machine is Sherrington–Kirkpatrick model with external field. This is price in physics given to novel use of stochastic spin-glass modelling…
It's mathematical/CS work. The connection to actual physical laws or phenomena is even more tenuous than the prize for exoplanets a few years ago.
The Nobel prize physics committee has made itself a joke, and probably destroyed the credibility of the prize.
In this case, there's a good argument that Hopfield had conducted strong work as a physicist and in physics, but Geoffrey Hinton has never worked as a Physicist, at best adopting some existing things from physics into cognitive science use cases. In any case, what they've been given the prize for is work where they've not contributed to the understanding of the world of physics - it's not even really an arguable case where this is work that crosses over between Physics and another field either. It'd be like if Black or Scholes had been given the Physics prize rather than Economics because their famous equation can be re-written in Schrodinger equation form.