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

nobelprize.org

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

#681

Post by manquer »

adastra22 wrote: post #108
tempusalaria wrote: post #3

What bizarre choice. Hinton’s work has nothing to do with physics. Nobel prize jumping on the bandwagon, just like they did for mRNA after covid. At least that was related to medicine. The first 2 paragraphs of the linked pdf read like a joke. Like it’s a parody announcement.

Or Obama’s peace prize.

It is different for Peace prize , it has always been political and different from day one , it is awarded by Norwegian noble committee which is appointed by the Norwegian parliament.

All other prizes are awarded in Sweden by Swedish academy(for literature) , Royal Swedish Academy for sciences (physics and chemistry) , karolinska institute (physiology) are all professionally established organizations at the time of Nobel’s death with other activities professional organizations do.

Norwegian Nobel committee while in theory independent is just people appointed by the parliament with no need to have professional standing in their field on which they are supposed to award the prize in and it always shows .

Obama’s prize is hardly the first egregious one or even the most outrageous Henry Kissinger got one .

So it kind of matters on the changed standards in swedish technical ones while peace has been disaster for half century or more , with non transparent process selected by ex- MPs

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

#682

Post by fsndz »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #680

Isn't backpropagation to train NNs the big innovation in this space? Neither of these guys invented that.

I think they look at the overall impact not just one single thing. a lot of people invented backpropagation independently but after that their impact was low. Hinton is like everywhere when you look at the state of machine learning now

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

#683

Post by mppm »

jmakov wrote: post #602

Wonder when Anna will get her share since she's making all this possible by making the articles and books available (Anna's archive).

It will be awarded jointly to Anna and Alexandra. "For incalculable contributions to all sciences".

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

#684

Post by hermitcrab »

tempusalaria wrote: post #3

What bizarre choice. Hinton’s work has nothing to do with physics. Nobel prize jumping on the bandwagon, just like they did for mRNA after covid. At least that was related to medicine. The first 2 paragraphs of the linked pdf read like a joke. Like it’s a parody announcement.

I agree. I don't see how this is physics in any accepted sense of the word.

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

#685

Post by cma »

miven wrote: post #206
jampekka wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TBF backpropagation was introduced only in the 1970's, although in hindsight it's a quite trivial application of the chain rule. There were also plenty of "hacks" involved to make the networks scale such as dropout regularization, batch normalization, semi-linear activation functions (e.g. ReLU) and adaptive stochastic gradient descent methods. The maths for basic NNs is really simple but the practice of them is real…

Residual connections are also worth mentioning as an extremely ubiquitous adaptation, one will be hard-pressed to find a modern architecture that doesn't use those at least to some extent, to the point where the original Resnet paper sits at over 200k citations according to google scholar[1]. [1] https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...

Highway nets introduced them in the 90s

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

#686

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

Maxatar wrote: post #272
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #256

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…

Einstein received the Nobel prize: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1921/summary/

Ah. My mistake. Thanks for correcting me.

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

#687

Post by tgv »

chronolitus wrote: post #214

Moreso genuine curiosity than as a gotcha: A lot of comments are saying this was the wrong choice. I'd find it really interesting to hear who the nomination should have gone to instead, in your opinions.

They are not under an obligation to award the prize. They could have just said "sorry, we can't think of anyone."

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

#688

Post by henrikschroder »

gtirloni wrote: post #637
whizzter wrote: post #444

Earlier 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.

Trusted? The will of Alfred Nobel states that the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences is the body that selects the winner, you can't change that.

Also, I think the process looks fairly decent:

https://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/physics/

Gather nominations, make a shortlist, research the shortlist with actual field experts, present candidates, discuss, and vote.

And in 50 years you'll be able to find out who the other candidates were!

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

#689

Post by quaxi »

hermitcrab wrote: post #684
tempusalaria wrote: post #3

What bizarre choice. Hinton’s work has nothing to do with physics. Nobel prize jumping on the bandwagon, just like they did for mRNA after covid. At least that was related to medicine. The first 2 paragraphs of the linked pdf read like a joke. Like it’s a parody announcement.

I agree. I don't see how this is physics in any accepted sense of the word.

When Alfred Nobel wrote his will in 1895, there was no computer science or information theory.

One could argue it's closer to mathematics than physics, but if you'd say to him that someone made sand think like a human he might even put it under the medicine category.

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