761–770 of 876 posts
Like if there weren't many good movies they wouldn't start giving the Oscar for Best Picture to a videogame.
It’s time to consider adding computer science as a category for the Nobel Prize. They have already been awarded prizes for economic sciences and peace, so why not computer science? It's not the same as physics, and its impact on modern life is undeniable
Is that even "possible"? As in, they have to follow the rules of the organization, which have some criteria laid out. Not sure who could stop them from changing, though. Like, I think the original intent was to have done the most the preceding year, but now it's more of a lifetime award. So perhaps they can change or add different categories if wanted.
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Is that even "possible"? As in, they have to follow the rules of the organization, which have some criteria laid out. Not sure who could stop them from changing, though. Like, I think the original intent was to have done the most the preceding year, but now it's more of a lifetime award. So perhaps they can change or add different categories if wanted.
That's the only reason I can think of for this - like, Alfred Nobel or some other dead donor set rules that they aren't allowed to change now. But I haven't seen anyone confirm it.
In 1968, the Nobel Foundation accepted a donation from the Swedish central bank to establish a prize in economy, but in hindsight that was a pretty bad idea, and the probability of them accepting future donations to establish prizes in other fields is very slim.
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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 No…
Obama’s and Kissinger’s prizes are both disastrous for entirely different reasons. And I don’t mean anything partisan by that. Kissinger was awarded a peace prize for achieving a cease fire in the Vietnam war … a war in which he’d personally been responsible for some of the worst and most illegal excesses. Obama was awarded the peace prize for literally nothing. It was anticipatory, meant to urge him towards ending A…
Unless the process of selection of the committee (unqualified, political) and process of selection of the winner(opaque and inconsistent criteria) is fixed we will have poor candidates winning it in the future too
Unlike the economic prize peace was one that Alfred Noble actually wanted himself to be an award given too.
One could also argue peace prize should be the most important of them all. Noble wished to mitigate the military application of his invention, the peace prize should be achieving that most.
The continued poor judgment of the parliament in selecting the committee and the committee in selecting winners devalues the prize for future winners and devalues the good work the Swedish institutions have put in making it the premier award in their fields
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Math, Logic, Epistemology, et al are not "subfields of physics" - The other way around is more likely.
I also had this view, but thinking a bit more about it, what we consider 'reasonable axioms' in math, all come more or less from our logical intuition. Which was built from our evolution, which respects the laws of physics. This has changed my point of view to where math is kinda derived from physics, as the axioms (but even the derivation rules, like modus ponens) are chosen because they respect what feels intuitive…
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VisiCalc, surely. Lotus 123, much like Excel, was just following in the footsteps of the original spreadsheet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisiCalc
This practical idea of spreadsheet has much more impact to society than many innovation. Nobel prize worthy.
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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.
Most commenters here don't know that Boltzmann machines and associative memories existed in condensed matter physics long before they were used in cognitive science or AI. The Sherrington–Kirkpatrick model of spin glass is a Hopfield network with random initialization. Boltzmann machine is Sherrington–Kirkpatrick model with external field. This is price in physics given to novel use of stochastic spin-glass modelling…
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I did have a similar thought, but awarding a prize to AF this year would be a very bold move, given how things went today. Right folks, we've demoralized all the physicists today, tomorrow we can do the same for the chemists!
To be perfectly honest, I'm not really sure the physics community being demoralized by this prize award is a really negative thing. I think many aspects of HEP and other areas have stagnated, requiring exponentially more money for marginal gains (I don't have a problem with LIGO or other large projects, but "we found another high energy particle consistent with the standard models" not so much). Perhaps this prize wi…