Why does it fall under physics and not under mathematics?
the Nobel Prize doesn't do mathematics.
Further: the "Nobel equivalent" maths prize is the Fields Medal:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fields_Medal>
Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]
661–670 of 876 posts
Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]
#662Earlier quoted context omitted.
The General Public and Economists hold it in the same regard as other Nobel Prizes so appeal to 'formality' is pointless. The social recognition is the point of these awards so if it has that and is also often called the "Nobel Prize in Economics" then it's a Nobel Prize. They're literally announced and awarded together. Nobody but a few nitpicks care about your distinction because it's not a real one. Might as well…
It is also my prerogative not to care about your opinion. You claimed you come across this a lot and don't get it. I just told you. Take it or leave it.
>It is also my prerogative not to care about your opinion.
Sure
>You claimed you come across this a lot and don't get it. I just told you. Take it or leave it.
I'm not OP. And i don't think a few comments on Nobel prize threads is a lot in the first place. Nothing for me to "take".
Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]
#663I 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…
Nor did Georges Lemaître, nor other theorists, and in that case the experimental physicists who (accidentally!) discovered the evidence did win Nobels.
Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]
#664Here is the reasoning: https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2024/09/advanced-physicsp... I'm surprised Terry Sejnowski isn't included, considering it seems to be for Hopfield Nets and Boltzmann machines, where Terry played a large role in the latter.
Is this a widely accepted version of neural network history? I recognize Rosenblatt, Perceptron, etc., but I have never heard that Hopfield nets or Bolzmann machines were given any major weight in the history. The descriptions I have read were all mathematical, focusing on the computational graph with the magical backpropagation (which frankly is just memoizing intermediate computations). The descriptions also went o…
Bolzman machines were there in the very early days of deep learning. It was a clever hack to train deep nets layer wise and work with limited ressources.
Each layer was trained similar to the encoder part of an autoencoder. This way the layerwise transformations were not random, but roughly kept some of the original datas properties. Up to here training was done without the use of labelled data. After this training stage was done, you had a very nice initialization for your network and could train it end to end according to your task and target label.
If I recall correctly, the neural layers output was probabilistic. Because of that you couldn't simply use back propagation to learn the weights. Maybe this is the connection to John Hopkins work. But here my memory is a bit fuzzy.
Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]
#665Earlier 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.
Maybe it's a prize for hope and change that physics will be revolutionized by neural networks? Similar to how Obama got a Nobel Peace Prize in order to repudiate Bush's legacy in Iraq and Afghanistan. While Bush's legacy absolutely deserved to be repudiated, I don't think awarding a new president the Peace Prize was the best way to do it, especially because in the foreign policy realm, he ended up not so different fr…
Maybe read the announcement?
"With their breakthroughs, that stand on the foundations of physical science, they have showed a completely new way for us to use computers to aid and to guide us to tackle many of the challenges our society face. Simply put, thanks to their work Humanity now has a new item in its toolbox, which we can choose to use for good purposes. Machine learning based on ANNs is currently revolutionizing science, engineering and daily life. The field is already on its way to enable breakthroughs toward building a sustainable society, e.g. by helping to identify new functional materials. How deep learning by ANNs will be used in the future depends on how we humans choose to use these incredibly potent tools, already present in many aspects of our lives"
Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]
#666I think this is the Royal Academy of Sciences way to admit that Physics as a research subject has ground to a halt. String theory suffocated theoretical high energy physics for nearly half a century with nothing to show for it, and a lot of other areas of fundamental physics are kind of done.
My sense is that we might have reached the limits of what we can do in high-energy or fundamental physics without accessing energy levels or other extreme states that we currently can't access as they are beyond our capacity to generate. From what I've read (not a professional physicist) string theory is not testable unless we can either examine a black hole or create particle accelerators the size of the Moon's orbi…
> My sense is that we might have reached the limits of what we can do in high-energy or fundamental physics without accessing energy levels or other extreme states that we currently can't access
How can we know, as past decades theoretical high-energy physics has studied made-up mathematical universes that don't tell much about our real universe. We haven't really given it that much of a try, yet.
Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]
#667Earlier quoted context omitted.
ML absolutely has helped astrophysics in sorting the massive amount of observation data to make new discovery.
So if someone will invent say a new keyboard layout which will improve median data input rate by 10% and will be used by astrophysicists then it will be worthy of the astrophysics prize? Or better yet - in your example the main driver for the ML is Nvidia, should be award Jensen a prize in astrophysics? Or in any other field where ML is deployed? In my opinion we should separate efforts of people making tools, from t…
No. Because the keyboard while faster is not instrumental in finding new stars. ML is instrumental in finding new stars and new planets.
Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]
#668Here is the reasoning: https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2024/09/advanced-physicsp... I'm surprised Terry Sejnowski isn't included, considering it seems to be for Hopfield Nets and Boltzmann machines, where Terry played a large role in the latter.
Is this a widely accepted version of neural network history? I recognize Rosenblatt, Perceptron, etc., but I have never heard that Hopfield nets or Bolzmann machines were given any major weight in the history. The descriptions I have read were all mathematical, focusing on the computational graph with the magical backpropagation (which frankly is just memoizing intermediate computations). The descriptions also went o…
> I have never heard that Hopfield nets or Bolzmann machines were given any major weight in the history.
Either way, these had a lot of influence on the early work, which does permeate into the modern stuff. There's this belief that all the old stuff is useless and I just think that's wrong. There's a lot of hand engineered stuff that we don't need anymore, but a lot of the theory and underlying principles are still important.
Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]
#669Earlier quoted context omitted.
Computer science has the Turing award and mathematics the Fields medal. Neither is exactly equivalent to the Nobel but they're similar levels of prestige. The Nobel prize fields and criteria are a bit random, they're essentially just whatever Alfred Nobel wrote in his will.
they're similar levels of prestige Within their respective fields, not in general. What makes the Nobel so unique and desirable is that everybody knows what it is and is impressed by it. Mentioning that you've won a Nobel prize will impress people and open doors in virtually any circumstance. Saying you have a Turing award will mostly lead to blank stares from anybody outside the field.
It also lets you co-host the Ig Nobels, if that’s a more meaningful accomplishment to you.
Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]
#670Earlier quoted context omitted.
He was probably considered since he is mentioned in the reasoning paper, still it could be one of those unfortunate omissions in the nobel history since those deciding the prize might have a hard time to measure impact.
Then they shouldn't be trusted to give awards in an area they are not experts in.
That would probably leave the prizes awarded in a very narrow field, also the prize is supposed to be given to the thing that has "conferred the greatest benefit to humankind".
So in this case they picked something that might be viewed as only having a tangential connection to the field, but the impact has been so immense that they probably went outside their regular comfort zone (and how many prizes can we give for LHC work that really don't touch regular human lives in the foreseeable future anyhow?).