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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]

#551
post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn’t he a socialist?

Doesn't matter. He wants to work on AI risk, right?

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

#552
post #548

I strongly suspect consciousness will be the next great paradigm in physics, following electrodynamics, quantum mechanics, and general relativity, now that the ‘detour’ of string theory is mostly behind us. Some, like Penrose, are already thinking about it but too late in their careers to make any breakthroughs. Machine learning research is the logical entry point as the ‘particle physics’ of cognition and consciousn…

Of course there's another reason why physics PhDs are working on ML these days -- it's also the same reason so many of them are Wall Street quants.

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

#553
This feels.... Weird, It feels like Turing award exist for a reason and Hinton getting Nobel prise in physics is a stretch, unless you claim his contribution extend to things such as development of Alphafold.

In any case, I'm anticipating a long blog post from Schmidhuber about this soon.

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

#554
post #548

I strongly suspect consciousness will be the next great paradigm in physics, following electrodynamics, quantum mechanics, and general relativity, now that the ‘detour’ of string theory is mostly behind us. Some, like Penrose, are already thinking about it but too late in their careers to make any breakthroughs. Machine learning research is the logical entry point as the ‘particle physics’ of cognition and consciousn…

I am a physicist working in ML and this is an absolutely bonkers comment lol

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

#555

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…

Do laypeople know Kepler?

Depends on the quality of the '"lay" public' I guess.

Where I live, in my estimation the 'educated "lay" public' would probably have heard of all the names mentioned, but with even worse notions of what their actual contributions were for Kepler.

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

#557

Just watched the nobel prize live stream, surprised by the topic, looks very engineering to me rather than physics, do algorithms make physics subsidiary?

Well in 1912, the physics prize went to a guy who designed a better light for light houses and buoys to prevent shipwrecks! Actually, most early Nobels went to practical things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustaf_Dal%C3%A9n

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

#558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am really surprised. I would have guessed that a Nobel Prize would be awarded to advancements in the field itself. Not for inspirations from it or to tools that led to advancements. Although as I write this I'm sure there have been several prizes awarded to scientists / engineers who have developed tools to advance physics. Like radio astronomy? Still surprised though.

Some other recent cases of the prize being given to an engineering contribution: - 2018 was for chirped pulse amplification, which is most commonly used in medicine (LASIK surgery for example) - 2014 was for basically for LED lights - 2010 was for a method for producing graphene - 2009 was for both charge-coupled device, which is a component for digital imaging (including regular consumer digital cameras), and fibre-…

CPA is very very widely used in experimental physics, so I don’t really think it belongs on this list.

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

#560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It still kind of baffles me that there isn't a Nobel Prize in Mathematics and/or computer science. The latter makes a bit more sense, computer science wasn't really a thing when Alfred Nobel was around, but mathematics certainly was! It seems like it would be perfectly reasonable to add a category for math, and I think Neural Nets would fit in there considerably better.

The Swedish central bank later added the price in economics (although controversial). So other things can be amended. However, I suspect we won't see any more amendments to the noble price. A different institution can step up and make a price on its own, though I'm not sure what institution would have that amount of prestige without weaponizing it for commercial purposes. I prefer a nicer price for mathematics that i…

If a new prize is added, it would need its own funding. The five original Nobel Prizes are funded by interest from the fortune that Alfred Nobel left behind. The economics prize is funded by the Swedish central bank, and is therefore officially their prize "in memory of Alfred Nobel", not a "Nobel Prize" as such.
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