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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]

#361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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. I think first you're underestimating "laypeople" which seems to include many scientists who are not physicists, and second you are forgetting that many of the scientists the "lay" public knows as the greatest of all times never received a Nobel, or any other famous pri…

Einstein received the Nobel prize: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1921/summary/

Neither for relativity nor mass-energy equivalence though, which laypeople are much more likely to know about than the photoelectric effect (what the price was actually awarded for).

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

#363
post #29

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

Well I'm sure a $50 billion collider will fix things.

Please bro just one more collider. Just one more collider bro. I swear bro we're gonna fix physics forever. Just one more collider bro. We could go up or even underground. Please bro just one more collider.

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

#364

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…

This is the only plausible reason: “These artificial neural networks have been used to advance research across physics topics as diverse as particle physics, materials science, and astrophysics,” Ellen Moons, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said at a press conference this morning.

And medicine and literature and chemistry and war. Maybe they'll get all the prizes?

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

#365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feynman was a well-known proponent of AI and neural networks [1]. He even gave popular lectures on the subject [2]. He also claimed that replicating animal-like visual recognition abilities in machines would be Nobel-worthy; deep learning was certainoy a breakthrough in that. [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2209.00083 [2] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ipRvjS7q1DI

None of these arguments support giving a prize for this in this field for this reason. Feynman was also critical of the idea of the prize in general

They were responding to a specific claim someone made about Feynman's views. It's a good contribution to these comments and highly relevant.

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

#369
post #160
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…

As a layman, the visualization of black holes, the superstructure above and below the Milky Way, JWST’s distant galaxy discoveries, gravitational wave detectors as mentioned, and some of the Kuiper Belt observations all seem to be interesting and exciting.

Oh and the death of string theory!

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

#370

Feynman would voice his objections if he were alive ... what about nature was discovered? ANN is an application of a variant of Universal Approximation Theorem ...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037015731...

"Jet substructure at the Large Hadron Collider: A review of recent advances in theory and machine learning"

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