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

nobelprize.org

341–350 of 876 posts

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

#341
post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it already had, bottom-quark tagging has improved O(10)x in efficiency in the last decade without any new "physics" understanding, just from training with more low-level data and better ML arch (now using Transformers) but we haven't found new physics with or without ML, making this prize a little weird.

I sort of agree in principle but in practise they've always taken a broad view. Kissinger was one of the most prominent disrupters of world peace in the postwar era but that didn't stop him winning the peace prize. Churchill won the literature prize for defeating Hitler. The blue led guys a few years back didn't do much except make a thing that would go on every single consumer gadget and disrupt my sleep but they wo…

>Einstein supposedly won for "especially his work on the photoelectric effect" rather than relativity.

just adding to this, this is because relativity wasn't experimentally verified (i.e. not sure if it's reality) at the time.

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

#342

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

Don't forget Barack Obama for absolutely no valid reason.

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

#343
post #292

Congrats to the laureates! Maybe a Computing prize should be created though, like Nobel did not create the "nobel prize of economy".Though you could argue that Computing is Math? What are computer scientists usually awarded with? edit: s/rewarded/awarded

>What are computer scientists usually rewarded with? The Turing Award is considered by most to be the highest award in computer science.

Hinton already won a Turing award, so this Nobel just seems doubly absurd.

I hope he turns it down, but it's a monetary prize too and it takes a lot of dedication to science to turn it down.

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

#345

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…

> wtf do these people think they are appointing themselves fit to hand out trinkets and baubles on behalf of global scientific achievement?

https://www.kva.se/en/prizes/nobel-prizes/the-nomination-and...

https://www.kva.se/en/about-us/members/list-of-academy-membe...

> who are they to award such a prize on behalf of physics?

They're not awarding anything in the name of physics, they're awarding a prize in the name of the Nobel committee.

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

#347
post #79

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…

Also double descent was discovered already by physicists in 80s-90s

In curious what's the context for this?

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

#348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most significant advance since electrification I just don't see how this can be claimed at this point.

Well, society would collapse without computers so I think the description is apt. At best you could argue that they're the same phenomenon, but then you might equally well argue electrification is just the consequence of steam engines.

Wait, was the parent comment talking about computers or ML? I interpreted it as the latter. The former I can get behind and I'd retract my statement!

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

#349
post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kissinger another.

Also Barack Obama. It's hard to be POTUS without commiting war crimes.

Do be fair to the Nobel committee, he commit his purported "war crimes" after getting the prize.

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

#350
post #212

Hinton was never going to win the Nobel Prize while working for Google, right?

I genuinely think there is potential for a silly Internet tradition here. Google should pick bunch of candidate winners by ML, hire them six months before, fire them all a week before awarding, and then programmatically re-hire moments before awarding. It can't be more malicious than most academic pranks and it shouldn't matter whether the conspiracy is real, it'll be just funny.
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