As someone who has done lots of work in both fields, this is some BS.
Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]
571–580 of 876 posts
Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]
#572“In 1985 Hinton published a paper ‘How I Intend to Screw Over Physicists by Winning Their Nobel Prize’”
As expected iconoclast Sabine Hossenfelder is quick out of the gate with sarcasm and commentary on this one.
Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]
#573Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think calling it a conspiracy theory is a bit of a stretch. I could be wrong. I agree that's how it should be. But I don't get the impression there are lot of fans of Google in the Prize Committee. Either way, it's not something that matters too much. Just a thought.
> I think calling it a conspiracy theory is a bit of a stretch. It's the textbook definition of a conspiracy theory, isn't it? I mean, a group conspiring to not awarding the most prestigious prize in science to someone who deserved it because of who their employer was, and suddenly awarding it once he switched employers? > But I don't get the impression there are lot of fans of Google in the Prize Committee. This is…
I get what you're saying. I have no evidence and no inside information. It could be a conspiracy, but I doubt it. It could just be multiple individuals independently being uncomfortable with tacitly approving a huge company they see as potentially responsible for privacy problems, ethics problems and AI misuse. I don't see these as invalid concerns either. And I don't see being conflicted about giving an award to an employee of a company tied to big ethical concerns as anti-science or having a lack of integrity.
Discovering breakthroughs in machine learning is a profound achievement and deserves to be recognized. Wielding powerful tools against humanity for the sake of money, not so much. But, like I said, I could be dead wrong, and this is probably why I wouldn't be a good person to serve on one of these committees.
Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]
#574What if I were to tell you that Physics included more than Theoretical Particles? Are experimental Physicist just Engineers? Are String Theorists just Mathematicians? Is John von Neumann not a Physicist because he also worked with Computers? Awful lot of nit-picking in this thread.
No; The Nobel Committee has done a complete error in judgement with this. These are Mathematics/CS techniques and nothing whatever to do with core Theoretical/Experimental Physics notwithstanding that they may have been inspired from Physics. There are plenty of Physics Researchers toiling away at real hard problems of the Physical World and instead of recognizing them the Committee has gone with "market fads" which…
I think there has now been enough crossover between Information Theory and Quantum Mechanics, that we can stop splitting hairs between "it's an algorithm on a computer, that isn't physics".
Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]
#575“In 1985 Hinton published a paper ‘How I Intend to Screw Over Physicists by Winning Their Nobel Prize’” As expected iconoclast Sabine Hossenfelder is quick out of the gate with sarcasm and commentary on this one. https://youtu.be/dR1ncz-Lozc?si=7kpntqwCzp0HLi02
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Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]
#576This 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.
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Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]
#577Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]
#578Feynman would voice his objections if he were alive ... what about nature was discovered? ANN is an application of a variant of Universal Approximation Theorem ...
IMO this award recognizes the effort and success of modeling the acquisition of knowledge, especially toward realizing such models in usable ways that will surely redefine life on this planet forever. Few Nobels have recognized work that is so culturally groundbreaking (and so disruptive). It'd be hard to see the Nobels as a significant measure of science/technology if they did NOT acknowledge the revolution begat by ML using DL. And with Hopfield at age 91 and Hinton 76, now is the right time to do so.
Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]
#579It seems physics is natural continuation for those who want understand what's behind the curtains after all. Thanks physicists for providing support for AI scientists. Next phase for joint research is quantum AI where one would need expertise in both physics and ML.
Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]
#580Earlier 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 fields medal fills that gap
Yeah, and the Turing Award for CS, and there's probably a bunch more that I'm forgetting.
Still kind of weird that the prestigious award that everyone has heard of doesn't have a mathematics category.