2024 Nobel Prize in Physics to Hopfield and Hinton for artificial neural networks
In one sentence The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awards the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.
On October 8, 2024 the Physics Nobel goes to two neural-network pioneers: John Hopfield (born 1933, Princeton University) and Geoffrey Hinton (born 1947 in London, University of Toronto).
The Academy explains that the two used tools from physics to develop the methods underlying today's machine learning. Hopfield created an associative memory, a network able to store images and reconstruct them even from a damaged version. Hinton, starting from the Hopfield network, invented the Boltzmann machine, which learns on its own to recognise characteristic elements in data.
It is an unusual award for physics, and part of the community debated whether it was really a physics prize. The citation stresses the link with statistical physics and magnetic spin systems.
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University of Toronto, Princeton University
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