521–530 of 876 posts
I find the prize a bit odd this time since it focused on Hopfield networks and Boltzmann machines. Picking those two architectures in particular seems a bit arbitrary. Besides, Parisi got the prize last year (edit: actually 2021, time flies) for spin glasses. Hopfield networks are quite related. They could have included Hopfield & Hinton too, and it would have looked more coherent. It is also concerning that lately t…
The Nobel in Physics only goes with experimental discoveries, Peter Higgs didn't get his (deserved since the 70s) until the LHC directly observed the particle. I agree that Hopfield networks and Boltzmann machines are a surprisingly arbitrary choices. It is like they wanted to give a prize to someone for neural networks, but had to pick people from inside their own field to represent the development, which limited th…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tangential to your question but not the premise of this subthread/post - he became president in Feb 2009 and got the award in October. I don't think he started any new wars, but he inherited some and continued. Anyway, the point here should be the absurdity of a lot of Nobel awards and that stands - especially in his case. I mean Trump was nominated for the award for fuck's sake! More than 2 or 3 times iirc. So anywa…
Like it or not, one of the reasons Obama got the award was his campaign promise of withdrawing from Iraq. Guess who actually did it?
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…
However, it is weird for the committee to give a prize for theoretical physics without an experiment. It is doubly weird when they already made this "mistake" in 2021 with Parisi, who was the odd one out among the geophysicists, and are giving another prize in spin glass/stat phys... why?
You can't take this back, this literally just discredited the only nobel that actually mattered, great job discrediting the nobel.
This is an appropriate application of this prize considering the adage that there are now three pillars to science, the third being simulation (after theory and experiment). Also, many of the underlying theories in machine learning display deep analogy with physical laws we are already familiar with, e.g., thermodynamics. Machine learning is much bigger than chatbots.
>the adage that there are now three pillars to science, the third being simulation (after theory and experiment)
Any specific place I could learn more about this? (aside from Google obv.)
I do simulation for a living, so that is mega-interesting to me.
This must be frustrating to see for all the actual physicists out there. What work in physics got ignored so that a prize for AI could be shoehorned in? I do think work on neural networks does rise to the level of a Nobel Prize. So I don't have any problem with this work getting such high-level recognition. But I really struggle with the physics classification and the side effect of omitting an award to physicists th…
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2018/summary/
Peter Shor also got an award (albeit non Nobel) for something that overlaps Physics with Math + CS.
https://news.mit.edu/2022/shor-spielman-breakthrough-prize-0...
To me, I'd rather see a Nobel Prize in Math/CS/IS but if I had to choose where these type of work would be shoehorned into existing Nobel prize category physics would be it.
This must be frustrating to see for all the actual physicists out there. What work in physics got ignored so that a prize for AI could be shoehorned in? I do think work on neural networks does rise to the level of a Nobel Prize. So I don't have any problem with this work getting such high-level recognition. But I really struggle with the physics classification and the side effect of omitting an award to physicists th…
Well, was there anything in physics more important than AI? No? See...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> trying to jump on a "hot topic" bandwagon I don't know exactly what they hope to gain by jumping on that bandwagon though; neither the physicists nor the computer scientists are going to value this at all. And dare I say, the general populace associated with the two fields isn't going to either - case in point, this hn post. If there weren't any noble-worthy nominations for physics, maybe skip it? (Although that ha…
One possibility is that they think this will access hype funding. Put "AI" in a physics paper and watch the grants roll in.
This must be frustrating to see for all the actual physicists out there. What work in physics got ignored so that a prize for AI could be shoehorned in? I do think work on neural networks does rise to the level of a Nobel Prize. So I don't have any problem with this work getting such high-level recognition. But I really struggle with the physics classification and the side effect of omitting an award to physicists th…