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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]

#811

Post by Ma8ee »

eigenket wrote: post #787
Ma8ee wrote: post #781

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just briefly looked into what Jonathan Oppenheim is working on, and I’d say he’s part of the problem. More speculative work that might or might not be testable in a distant future.

I would say that's an overly simplistic view. The only way we ever obtain testable things is by working on things which are not currently testable.

It used to be that there was some experimental result or other phenomena that required explanation which lead to a theoretical model that could be tested. That worked very well.

Now there’s some theoretical considerations that leads to a theoretical model that can’t be tested. It didn’t work for Aristotle and it doesn’t work for string theorists (and similar).

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

#812

Post by what37373 »

canjobear wrote: post #511
aDyslecticCrow wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As inspiration, yes. However, a neural network neuron and a biological neuron are, to modern understanding, entirely unrelated.

They're not identical but they are related. There's a series of approximations and simplifications you can go through to get from biological neurons to neural nets. Essentially the weights in the neural net end up corresponding to steady-state firing rates of populations of spiking neurons. See for example Chapter 7 of Dayan & Abbott's Theoretical Neuroscience.

Not to be dismissive, but through any “series of approximations and simplifications” you can go from anything to anything else.

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

#813

Post by RamblingCTO »

dekhn wrote: post #489
scarmig wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This prize is more of a settler colonialist land grab by physicists. ML is just a subfield of physics (like every other field), so let's make sure that everyone knows that it's in our domain. Speaking as a onetime physicist now in ML...

machine learning is math, not physics. physics uses math, not the other way around. ML can be used in any field of science, not vice versa.

It's compsci, but nice try.

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

#814

Post by what37373 »

uoaei wrote: post #510
dev1ycan wrote: post #506

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.

Finance, biology, CS, anything that uses vaguely statistical models and principles is fair game now?

I don’t hate physics, but if you stretch terms like that they tend to lose meaning.

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

#816

Post by rdlecler1 »

Onavo wrote: post #656
hxnamer wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The deep learning variety of neural networks are heavily simplified, mostly linear versions of biological neurons. They don't resemble anything between your ears. Real life neurons are generally modeled by differential equations (in layman terms, have many levels of feedback loops tied to time), not the simplified ones used in dense layer activation functions. Here are some examples https://snntorch.readthedocs.io/en…

[flagged]

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

#817

Post by theGnuMe »

legel wrote: post #736
hxnamer wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Restricted Boltzmann Machines were a huge revolution in the field, warranting a publication in Science in 2006. If you want to know what the field looks like back then, here it is: https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/absps/science.pdf I remember in 2012 for my MS thesis on Deep Neural Networks spending several pages on Boltzmann Machines and the physics-inspired theories of Geoffrey Hinton. My undergraduate degree was…

Yeah I agree with the 2006 Hinton paper. I read it and reread it and didn't get it. I didn't have the math background at the time and it inspired me to get it. And here I am almost 20 years later working on it.

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

#818

Post by lrasinen »

meekaaku wrote: post #737
whatshisface wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And also why Einstein didnt get Nobel prize for his theories of relativity, but rather the 'discovery' of photoelectric effect.

The photoelectric effect was known before Einstein, so the award was for theoretical achievements. (But only after Millikan had done precision measurements on it)

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

#819

Post by trashtester »

DoughnutHole wrote: post #384
seanhunter wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sort of agree in principle but in practise they've always taken a broad view. Kissinger was one of the most prominent disrupters of world peace in the postwar era but that didn't stop him winning the peace prize. Churchill won the literature prize for defeating Hitler. The blue led guys a few years back didn't do much except make a thing that would go on every single consumer gadget and disrupt my sleep but they wo…

Einstein’s work on the photoelectric effect was incredibly important, and incredibly influential on other research at the time. He proposed that light was quantised - essentially the foundation of quantum mechanics. It’s no exaggeration that Einstein’s work on the photoelectric effect was as important as special or general relativity, and it had the advantage of strong experimental verification by 1921. The main reas…

The discovery of the photoelectric effect was certainly as important as relativity in terms of how much it affects society. But it was only an incremental advanced on top of Planck work on blackbody radiation.

I'm not saying that photoelectric effect didn't deserve a Nobel Prize. But relativity completely supplanted Newtonian Physics, and Einstein played a much greater role in this revolution than he did in that of Quantum Mechanics.

Also, I believe historical records have made it clear that relativity, even if it was still considered controversial in the '20s (and so not mentioned specifically), was indeed part of the reason he was awarded the prize.

Also, consider WHY it was still controversial, despite evidence piling up even for relativity. It was seen as such a fundamental shift away from common-sense understanding of the physical world that people refused to believe it, despite evidence.

Just like how many people to this day do not believe it's possilbe to build AI out of regular computers, as their intuition tells them that some magic vodoo needs to be there for "true" inteligence.

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

#820

Post by trashtester »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #376
seanhunter wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sort of agree in principle but in practise they've always taken a broad view. Kissinger was one of the most prominent disrupters of world peace in the postwar era but that didn't stop him winning the peace prize. Churchill won the literature prize for defeating Hitler. The blue led guys a few years back didn't do much except make a thing that would go on every single consumer gadget and disrupt my sleep but they wo…

Nobel prizes are generally awarded for verifiable observations but, also require real world applications. Einstein won the physics prize on the photoelectric effect due to having real world applications and observable and if GPS actually existed while he was arrived (yes I know this is a stretch) he would have gotten it for relativity. Blue LEDs allows you to access more of the color spectrum for LEDs in general and…

Relativity had just as much real world relevance in the 1920's as the Higgs boson has today....
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