Physics Nobel goes to machine-learning pioneers John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton

Good news! Well deserved! Machine learning & AI has finally arrived as a serious science!

I am surprised that the other two of the three godfathers  of ML & AI, i.e. Yann LeCun and Yoshua Bengio, were not recognized for their research.

I have blogged several times about Geoffrey Hinton. Some of his political views are naive at best.

"... In 1982, Hopfield, a theoretical biologist with a background in physics, came up with a network that described connections between virtual neurons as physical forces. By storing patterns as a low-energy state of the network, the system could re-create the pattern when prompted with something similar. It became known as associative memory, because the way in which it ‘recalls’ things is similar to the brain trying to remember a word or concept based on related information.

Hinton, a computer scientist, used principles from statistical physics, which collectively describes systems that have too many parts to track individually, to further develop the ‘Hopfield network’. By building probabilities into a layered version of the network, he created a tool that could recognize and classify images, or generate new examples of the type it was trained on. ..."

Physics Nobel scooped by machine-learning pioneers John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton pioneered computational methods that enabled the development of neural networks.