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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]

#841

Post by 77pt77 »

programjames wrote: post #157
meindnoch wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>where we all know that mathematics and/or CS deserve the honor Or semiconductor manufacturers. All the math and CS needed for AI can fit on a napkin, and had been known for 200+ years. It's the extreme scaling enabled by semiconductor science that really makes the difference.

> All the math and CS needed for AI can fit on a napkin, and had been known for 200+ years. This isn't really true. If you read a physics textbook from the early 1900s, they didn't really have multivariate calculus and linear algebra expressed as concisely as we do now. It would take several napkins. Plus, statistical mechanics was quite rudimentary, which is important for probability theory.

> If you read a physics textbook from the early 1900s, they didn't really have multivariate calculus and linear algebra expressed as concisely as we do now.

This is completely incorrect.

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

#842

Post by FrustratedMonky »

Maxatar wrote: post #491
Insanity wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m actually not sure why this is being downvoted? Is it actually incorrect and if so, where did it take inspiration from?

The downvotes are very unusual to say the least. All the historical material on the subject unambiguously points to neural networks emerging from work done to formalize actual brain neurons. That formalism turns out not to be a great way to explain biological brains but the abstraction it provided proved highly effective for tasks like pattern recognition, classification, and decision making. So much about computer s…

There are a lot of downvotes going around because a large contingent is thinking the Nobel Prize for "Physics" should not go to something involving Computer Science. That it was awarded as it was, was an error.

Seemingly because even if the math or algorithms came from a physicist solving physics problems . Since it didn't involve some theoretical particles, it isn't physics'y enough to get a Nobel in Physics.

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

#843

Post by 77pt77 »

jedrek wrote: post #294
worstspotgain wrote: post #257

When the most significant advance since electrification needs to hop the fence to be recognized, perhaps it's time to add a new field. It can be done, the Economics prize was added in 1968.

The economics prize is not an actual Nobel prize, but something "inspired" by the Nobel prize. It's little more than a tool to push neoliberal policies to the public, with 34 of the 56 winners tied to the Chicago School of Economics.

They just hijacked the prestige of the field.

Like medical doctors did with the term doctor and psychiatrists by claiming they were doing medicine.

The list is almost endeless.

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

#845

Post by ajkjk »

Arainach wrote: post #838
ajkjk wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone's first thought when they read something is whatever the social norms say you're supposed to think (peer review = good, publishing without peer review = not science somehow?), but shouldn't you stop and wonder why the esteemed scientist wrote that line instead of just dismissing it? Otherwise you are only chiming in to enforce a norm that everyone already knows about, which is pointless. One of the really re…

>shouldn't you stop and wonder why the esteemed scientist wrote that line instead of just dismissing it? I go to forums like Hacker News and Reddit and regularly see software engineers who are outraged about having to have their code reviewed and even more outraged about actually having to implement feedback from their reviewers rather than receiving a rubber stamp. I go to work and see the effects on product, team,…

You are talking about something different than I am. I'm not saying you should have un-peer-reviewed major research. But there are other types of communication that are useful but do not need to be rigorously vetted. (not that peer review is all that good at the vetting anyway)

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

#847

Post by [deleted] »

openrisk wrote: post #89

This does indeed smell of desperation. Which is really, really sad. Advances in _real_ physics are central to the absolutely needed sustainability transition. In a sane society that values its self-preservation you would not need to grasp at second-order straws to justify the need for all sorts of both fundamental and applied physics research. We need to think seriously whether our collective hallucinations (pun) hav…

[deleted]

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

#848

Post by tightbookkeeper »

mportela wrote: post #747
adw wrote: post #693

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hopfield networks and Boltzmann machines Think of this as a Nobel prize for systems physics – essentially "creative application of statistical mechanics" – and it makes a lot more sense why you'd pick these two. (I am a mineral physicist who now works in machine learning, and I absolutely think of the entire field as applied statistical mechanics; is that correct? Yes and no: it's a valid metaphor.)

Having studied control engineering, it feels like ML is control theory + optimization all the way down :) I love how folks from different backgrounds can interpret it in so many ways.

ML is remembering that computers can do math.

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

#849

Post by bmitc »

amai wrote: post #168
Ma8ee wrote: post #15

I 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.

> Physics as a research subject has ground to a halt Max Planck was told by his professor to not go into Physics because "almost everything is already discovered". Planck said he didn't want to discover anything, just learn the fundamentals.

Are people working on fundamentals these days? It seems to be a forgotten art, where everyone is working at the edge of something.

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

#850

Post by bmitc »

fooker wrote: post #784
bunderbunder wrote: post #708

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those two buckets only contain the work in physics that have a sustained presence in popular media. But take gravitational wave astronomy as a counterexample. It doesn't make it into the news much, but I'm pretty sure the entire field is less than ten years old.

Yes, good example. They already got a Nobel prize, one of the quickest in history. This is the kind of physics we might need more of.

> They already got a Nobel prize, one of the quickest in history.

From some aspects, it was late. Gravitation waves were predicted decades ago. It's almost unfair to predict something but then have engineering take decades to catch up to be able to prove/disprove the theory. This is just commentary on the notion of being right decades before the world is ready for it. Of course, it can go the other way where one is assumed to be right but then isn't (e.g., many components of string theory).

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