Earlier quoted context omitted.
[party pooping] It would have been better delivery if you said " a Nobel prize" instead of " the ".
Noble != Nobel
Ah my bad.
Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]
481–490 of 876 posts
Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]
#482Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see a date in the PDF. When was it written?
It's a chapter from here: Rumelhart, D. E., McClelland, J. L., & the PDP research group. (1986). Parallel distributed processing: Explorations in the microstructure of cognition. Volume I. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
The whole book is quite good, btw! And it looks cool on a bookshelf.
Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]
#483There's a long backlog of major achievements in physics that haven't gotten a Nobel Prize in Physics . Giving the prize to something that has essentially nothing to do with physics is just a slap in the face to the physics community.
It still kind of baffles me that there isn't a Nobel Prize in Mathematics and/or computer science. The latter makes a bit more sense, computer science wasn't really a thing when Alfred Nobel was around, but mathematics certainly was! It seems like it would be perfectly reasonable to add a category for math, and I think Neural Nets would fit in there considerably better.
The Swedish central bank later added the price in economics (although controversial). So other things can be amended. However, I suspect we won't see any more amendments to the noble price.
A different institution can step up and make a price on its own, though I'm not sure what institution would have that amount of prestige without weaponizing it for commercial purposes.
I prefer a nicer price for mathematics that includes a bit of computer science than a price for computer science. I don't think there is much room for a "society-changing innovation" within CS that isn't either an engineering feat (Linux, Docker, FFmpeg) or an algorithm that could fit under a mathematics price (FFT, Navier Stokes).
Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]
#484Just watched the nobel prize live stream, surprised by the topic, looks very engineering to me rather than physics, do algorithms make physics subsidiary?
Eh. """AI""" is all the rage so I guess even the nobel in physics has to have something to do with this. Not a fan
Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]
#485Well maybe in time ML will help break through the high energy physics roadblocks.
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 the efforts of people doing research using said tools.
Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]
#486Just watched the nobel prize live stream, surprised by the topic, looks very engineering to me rather than physics, do algorithms make physics subsidiary?
The physics prize has historically taken the role of both "innovation/engineering" topics and "mathematics". It's more broad than simply physics. The most important factor tends to be the positive impact on society, as that's one of the price's core tenets.
>The most important factor tends to be the positive impact on society
Making it even more baffling that this won then
Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]
#487There's a long backlog of major achievements in physics that haven't gotten a Nobel Prize in Physics . Giving the prize to something that has essentially nothing to do with physics is just a slap in the face to the physics community.
I can only think of major achievements in my (narrow) field of study. What do you think could have reasonably been awarded?
Something for nonequilibrium statistical mechanics
Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]
#488Earlier quoted context omitted.
> New technology can always be used for good or bad. Always? Like atomic bombs? > His work in ML sets the course for a better future That very much remains to be seen, isn't it? So far, the negatives outweigh the positives.
Atomic bombs are a product of atomic energy. So are atomic energy, cancer treatment, electron microscopes, etc. I disagree the negatives outweigh the positive. Spellcheck, Google maps traffic, and electricity distribution are three applications I've used this morning. We dont tend to think about the successful applications, instead focusing the solely negative use like adtech.
> Atomic bombs are a product of atomic energy
Not really. There's no need to extract Pu-239, and it's quite a step to actually do that and then build a device that can create a large yield.
> Spellcheck
I wrote (several) spell checkers 30 years ago. One of them might still be in use. It's not deep learning.
> We dont tend to think about the successful applications
That doesn't take away the negatives, and certainly doesn't outweigh them at this moment to warrant a Nobel prize. In physics.
Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]
#489Earlier quoted context omitted.
Geoffrey Hinton wins the Nobel prize in physics for giving physics postdocs more reasonable job market options
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.
Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]
#490Earlier 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.
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…
The Nobel peace prize was a mistake. Peace is not a science, and you can't objectively measure how much anyone has helped peace, especially not before a few decades has passed.
So I agree that the peace prize committee has made some bad choices, but they do have an impossible job.