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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]

#371

Post by jonstewart »

seanhunter wrote: post #334
moelf wrote: 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…

Not supposedly.

"for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect"

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/lists/all-nobel-prizes-in-...

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

#372

Post by mr_mitm »

moelf wrote: post #341
seanhunter wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also, the prize is about the greatest benefit to humankind according to Alfred Nobel, not the most impressive research. Arguably, the photoelectric effect fits that notion better than GR or any other of Einstein's research.

Besides that, Einstein received the prize in 1921, whereas the Eddington experiment in 1919 generally counts as the first experimental verification of GR.

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

#373

Post by versteegen »

rvnx wrote: post #241
benrapscallion wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Must be, because in the field of artificial intelligence, if these techniques are not in production and considered obsoletes it's for a good reason. It may have been state-of-the-art in 1980s, but now is a bit late. Very smart people in their time though. In current times, a global prize to the transformers folks at least make more sense considering the context (despite it not being Physics).

The landmark Deep Belief Networks (stacked RBMs) paper in Science was in 2006 [1]. DBNs were completely obsolete quite quickly, but don't deny the immense influence of this line of research. It has over 23k citations, and was my introduction to deep learning, for one. And cited by the Nobel committee.

You're completely incorrect to say RBMs were of theoretical interest only. They have had plenty of practical use in computer vision/image modelling up to at least a few years ago (I haven't followed them since). Remember the first generative models of human faces?

Edit: Wow, Hinton is still pushing forward the state of the art on RBMs for image modelling, and I am impressed with how much they've improved in the last ~5 years. Nowhere near diffusion models, sure, but "reasonably good". [2]

[1] G.E. Hinton and R. Salakhutdinov, 2006, Science. "Reducing the Dimensionality of Data with Neural Networks"

[2] "Gaussian-Bernoulli RBMs Without Tears" https://arxiv.org/pdf/2210.10318

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

#374

Post by seanhunter »

jvanderbot wrote: post #291
throw_m239339 wrote: post #263

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

I think there's some backlash against a google-able answer here. However, from memory the list of biggest awards for CS/Math are: Fields medal Abel prize Turing award Godel award

I don't think Geoff Hinton is in the running for a Fields medal[1] any more, unless they did what they did for Andrew Wiles and give him a "quantized" Fields medal.

[1] You have to be under 40. https://www.fields.utoronto.ca/aboutus/jcfields/fields_medal...

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

#376

Post by zitterbewegung »

seanhunter wrote: post #334
moelf wrote: 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…

Nobel prizes are generally awarded for verifiable observations but, also require real world applications.

Einstein won the physics prize on the photoelectric effect due to having real world applications and observable and if GPS actually existed while he was arrived (yes I know this is a stretch) he would have gotten it for relativity.

Blue LEDs allows you to access more of the color spectrum for LEDs in general and they were not easy to make.

For this year it does feel like a very large leaning into practical applications instead of physics though. Did we run out of interesting physics in the last year?

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

#377

Post by Maken »

worstspotgain wrote: post #305
NlightNFotis wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this written a lot, and I don’t get it. What matters for an award is that people recognise it as a prestigious accolade. The economics prize, while not “official”, is still recognised by everyone in economics as the highest honour in the field. Who cares if it’s “official” or not? Awards and prizes derive their value from their social recognition, which it has a solid amount of, at the very least.

One could even argue it has all of the benefits and less of the dynamite scent.

There is nothing wrong with their connection with dynamite. Nobel designed it to prevent deaths in construction and mining, because nitroglycerine was way too dangerous (and way too useful to be abandoned). It's bad reputation comes from it's use in warfare, which is undeserved because it was not very well suited to that use and was quickly replaced by other solid explosives.

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

#378

Post by lyu07282 »

iandanforth wrote: post #317
kuschku wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The economics prize is not a Nobel prize.

"Although not one of the five Nobel Prizes established by Alfred Nobel's will in 1895, it is commonly referred to as the Nobel Prize in Economics, and is administered and referred to along with the Nobel Prizes by the Nobel Foundation. Winners of the Prize in Economic Sciences are chosen in a similar manner as and announced alongside the Nobel Prize recipients, and receive the Prize in Economic Sciences at the Nobel…

It's propaganda for liberalism. It's just that at a certain point that propaganda became so successful, that you sound like a lunatic if you call it propaganda. Unfortunately there was no reason to make propaganda for Mathematics so they never got their own Nobel prize.

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

#379

Post by seydor »

Separo wrote: post #235
seydor wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

very little to do with neuroscience

Except that the development of deep neural networks took direct inspiration biological neuroscience with neurons and synapses. Neural is even in the name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_learning

Actually iirc the first deep architectures that Hinton trained were restricted boltzmann machines
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