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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]

#861

Post by Arkhaine_kupo »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #503
Arkhaine_kupo wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a tired reply. The peace prize is not part of the same group as the other awards, and a significant difference in the peace award is that intent is awarded not results. The dude who invented the MAD doctrine did not get the award despite nuke deterrance doctrice being related to the least amount of wars in any century since WW2. But his platform of deescalation and his plans for american foregin diplomac…

The amount of people who act like Obama is a war monger without understanding the situation he found himself in is shockingly high, especially on a website like this with its supposedly "educated" people. Losing the TPP (Minus the IP parts)/Asia Pivot and the focus away from Nuclear Non Proliferation are terrifying. Obama is directly the reason why Myanmar had its democracy for as long as it did, and most people in S…

> The amount of people who act like Obama is a war monger

Its deliberate. Conservative PACs designed that legacy and pushed it hard. Trump quickly stopped reporting drone strikes, so that way he could pretend Obama was a big bad shooting at everyone. Not reporting != not happening.

> Losing the TPP (Minus the IP parts)

I actually see the point to the IP parts. Its a complicated mess, but China has abused it in the past so being able to sue goverments has its uses. For example when Lenovo was accused of IP theft to HP computers, the CCP bought stock in lenovo and made it impossible to take them to trial. Those kind of abuses are an issue when you try and promote fair competition due to high RD costs.

Obviously the can of worms it opens is huge and an issue in itself, but I see the point in why it was added to the TPP agreement and can't imagine how hard it was to put that in, before Trump came and broke the whole thing.

> Obama was awesome

Dealing with the worst recession in a century, passing the largest US healthcare change in history, preventing the arab spring from exploding everywhere, stopping ISIS, swift to the pacific etc. The amount of achievements its hard to point out when after that came a circus clown who would salute north korean generals.

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

#862

Post by Arkhaine_kupo »

js8 wrote: post #165
Arkhaine_kupo wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a tired reply. The peace prize is not part of the same group as the other awards, and a significant difference in the peace award is that intent is awarded not results. The dude who invented the MAD doctrine did not get the award despite nuke deterrance doctrice being related to the least amount of wars in any century since WW2. But his platform of deescalation and his plans for american foregin diplomac…

> The dude who invented the MAD doctrine did not get the award No, he didn't win the award, because MAD doctrine (aside from it being immoral) doesn't actually work in the real world. It's an idealized model based on game theory, which doesn't deal with pesky complexities such as irrationality, salami tactics, short-range CBMs, anti-missile defenses, tactical nukes and so on. (That's why many of these things used to…

> In reality many nations do not have nukes and live in peace.

not many of them are superpowers, or strategic interests of superpowers. See Taiwan, a country that until recently felt safe and at peace and is no longer unthreatened.

Most studies show that MAD allows for strategic peace for large superpowers and more regional wars for smaller countries. Ultimately it still decreases overall violence under all empirical studies on the subject.

The point I was making though was that the achivements of MAD are not measured when giving the award. However Israel and Palestine sitting down to talk in the 90s was, despite the talks ultimately going nowhere and being worse off now than before the Nobel Peace award

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

#863

Post by shiandow »

jebarker wrote: post #348
shiandow wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, society would collapse without computers so I think the description is apt. At best you could argue that they're the same phenomenon, but then you might equally well argue electrification is just the consequence of steam engines.

Wait, was the parent comment talking about computers or ML? I interpreted it as the latter. The former I can get behind and I'd retract my statement!

Hard to tell honestly. I just chose to fill in the blanks in a way that made for the strongest argument.

I mean a Nobel prize category for advances in computing makes a lot of sense and I can easily name a whole list of people who could qualify. We'll need to be quick if we don't want to award some of them posthumously though.

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

#864

Post by chriskanan »

hxnamer wrote: post #649
chriskanan wrote: post #386

Here 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…

Of the people who are still alive, Hopfield and Hinton make sense.

Hopfield networks led to Boltzmann machines. Deep learning started with showing that deep neural networks were viable in Hinton's 2006 Science paper, where he showed that by pre-training with a Restricted Boltzmann machine (essentially a stacked self-supervised auto-encoder) as a form of weight initialization, it was possible to effectively train neural networks with more than 2 layers. Prior to that finding, people found it was very hard to get backprop to work with more than 2 layers due to the activation functions people were using and problematic weight initialization procedures.

So long story short, while neither of them are in widespread use today, they led to demonstrating that neural networks were a viable technology and provided the FIRST strategy for successfully training deep neural networks. A few years later, people figured out ways to do this without the self-supervised pre-training phase by using activation functions with better gradient flow properties (ReLUs), better weight initialization procedures, and training on large datasets using GPUs. So without the proof of concept enabled by Restricted Boltzmann Machines, deep learning may not have become a thing, since prior to that almost all of the AI community (which was quite small) was opposed to neural networks except for a handful of evangelists (Geoff Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Yann LeCun, Terry Sejnowski, Gary Cottrell, and a handful of other folks).

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

#865

Post by soheil »

chriskanan wrote: post #386

Here 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.

Are you surprised every year that he's not included?

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

#866

Post by soheil »

> Their basic structure has close similarities with spin models in statistical physics applied to magnetism or alloy theory.

Statistical physics itself is hardly real physics, I also like how they avoided the term computational physics, which is what it's commonly known as. I suppose that might have given it away too quickly.

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

#867

Post by soheil »

620gelato wrote: post #93
eigenket wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is (very) inaccurate. It feels more like them trying to jump on a "hot topic" bandwagon (machine learning/AI hype is huge). Physics as a discipline hasn't really stalled at all. Fundamental physics arguably has, because no one really has any idea how to get close to making experimental tests that would distinguish the competing ideas. But even in fundamental physics there are cool developments like the s…

> trying to jump on a "hot topic" bandwagon I don't know exactly what they hope to gain by jumping on that bandwagon though; neither the physicists nor the computer scientists are going to value this at all. And dare I say, the general populace associated with the two fields isn't going to either - case in point, this hn post. If there weren't any noble-worthy nominations for physics, maybe skip it? (Although that ha…

It could also be that CS is saturated with too many noble-worthy nominations so they had to spill some over to another field with vacant seats.

Another guess is maybe they're trying to divert some of the insane attention in CS/AI to physics to get more people to join that field.

But still really bizarre decision,

AI/ANN/CS != Physics

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

#868

Post by soheil »

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…

Totally agree, for too many years some of the smartest people have been dedicating their lives to the development of FarmVille and AngryBirds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive

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

#869

Post by soheil »

fooker wrote: post #703
mishaevtikhiev wrote: post #219

My perspective as a PhD in theoretical physics, who's been doing deep learning in the last 4 years: 1. The prize itself makes zero sense as a prize in _physics_. Even the official announcement by the Nobel Prize Committee, taken at a face value, reads as a huge stretch in trying to link neural networks to physics. When one starts asking questions about the real impact on physics and whether the most important works o…

> because physics is currently stalled. Even if it's not completely true, maybe some introspection is required? I understand developing new theories is important and rewarding, but most physics for the last three decades seems to fall within two buckets. (1) Smash particles and analyze the data. (2) Mathematical models that are not falsifiable. We can be pretty sure that the next 'new physics' discovery that gives us…

Just because there happens to be economical viability for a field currently doesn't mean that field needs less introspection. Exactly what research contributions the people who are throwing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of GPUs at the next random "research" problem at the top of the queue at Microsoft or Google are making to deserve a Nobel?

Too often there is near zero intuition for why research in AI yields such incredible results. They're mainly black boxes that happen to work extremely well with no explanation and someone at a prestigious institution just happened to be there to stamp their name on top of the publication.

Big difference between research in AI and any non-computational/statistical/luck-based science.

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

#870

Post by thrdbndndn »

dang wrote: post #591
chriskanan wrote: post #386

Here 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.

I guess it makes sense to use that link above since it goes into much more detail. Changed from https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2024/summary/ . Thanks!

I know it's one day late but I personally don't agree with this change.

Using the main entry webpage is much easier for people to look for relevant info, including but not limited to: various articles about this specific award; other info about this year's Nobel, other info about Nobel in general.

This is exactly what the Internet (or WWW) is better than traditional printing media. Using a PDF as a link (which itself can be easily found from the entry point) defeats it.

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