[HN Gopher] Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and ...
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Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton
[pdf]
Author : drpossum
Score : 729 points
Date : 2024-10-08 09:52 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nobelprize.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nobelprize.org)
| jeffwass wrote:
| As a former physicist (PhD in Experimental condensed matter
| physics), I have to ask WTF?
|
| I get the importance of AI development, but Physics?
| tmelm wrote:
| I'm equally as confused; huge WTF moment. Seems like a paradigm
| breakthrough, in that Nobel Prizes can be given for discoveries
| in tangential fields. Or perhaps it's due to Dr. Hopfields
| physicist status, that all his discoveries are considered
| physics related? Or that NNs are considered a part of physics /
| nature?
| Alifatisk wrote:
| Yeah I was wondering the same, I get that this was fundamental
| work, but how was this strongly tied to physics?
| tempusalaria wrote:
| What bizarre choice. Hinton's work has nothing to do with
| physics.
|
| Nobel prize jumping on the bandwagon, just like they did for mRNA
| after covid. At least that was related to medicine.
|
| The first 2 paragraphs of the linked pdf read like a joke. Like
| it's a parody announcement.
| jampekka wrote:
| Hinton did introduce the Boltzmann machine networks that kind
| of resemble thermodynamics if you squint really hard. And those
| didn't really pan out.
|
| Of course the price is really for MLP backpropagation (or how
| it found applications) but I guess it's not physics enough.
|
| Hopfield networks never really found use either, but they are
| sort of related to Ising models and NNs, so I guess it's
| physics then.
| kgwgk wrote:
| At least they already recognized actual spin-glasses research
| in physics in 2021. That makes this award for this by-product
| more puzzling though.
| karmasimida wrote:
| Boltzmann machine does quote physics as its inspiration, they
| didn't award him for his work in BP and stuff.
|
| But I agree, this feels like a stretch.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Or Obama's peace prize.
| manquer wrote:
| 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
| Nobel's death with other activities professional
| organizations do.
|
| Norwegian Nobel committee while in theory independent is just
| people appointed by the parliament with no need to have
| professional standing in their field on which they are
| supposed to award the prize in and it always shows .
|
| Obama's prize is hardly the first egregious one or even the
| most outrageous Henry Kissinger got one .
|
| So it kind of matters on the changed standards in swedish
| technical ones while peace has been disaster for half century
| or more , with non transparent process selected by ex- MPs
| adastra22 wrote:
| 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 American wars in the
| Middle East (he escalated instead). The Nobel committee
| gets it wrong looking both forwards and backwards.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Hinton's work has nothing to do with physics.
|
| Nor did Jack Kilby's invention of the IC, but they still gave
| it to him.
|
| You could probably argue the same for the invention of the
| transistor...
| hermitcrab wrote:
| I agree. I don't see how this is physics in any accepted sense
| of the word.
| quaxi wrote:
| When Alfred Nobel wrote his will in 1895, there was no
| computer science or information theory.
|
| One could argue it's closer to mathematics than physics, but
| if you'd say to him that someone made sand think like a human
| he might even put it under the medicine category.
| jeanlucas wrote:
| Awesome.
|
| > They trained artificial neural networks using physics
|
| Here's from Nobel Prize official website:
| https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2024/press-release...
| drpossum wrote:
| I don't know if this is a travesty that they awarded the prize to
| work on non-physical systems to jump on a bandwagon or that there
| was nothing else obvious enough to the board in actual physics to
| give this to.
|
| If I was the awardee I'd consider declining just out of respect
| to the field.
| jgrahamc wrote:
| The linked document connects their work to physics as follows:
|
| "The Hopfeld network utilises physics that describes a
| material's characteristics due to its atomic spin - a property
| that makes each atom a tiny magnet. The network as a whole is
| described in a manner equivalent to the energy in the spin
| system found in physics, and is trained by fnding values for
| the connections between the nodes so that the saved images have
| low energy"
|
| "Hinton used tools from statistical physics, the science of
| systems built from many similar components."
| drpossum wrote:
| Then it should be awarded for the result.
|
| Given the line of reasoning this has now opened up Alan
| Turing should be awarded one posthumously in every field.
| eigenket wrote:
| He unironically should
| volkadav wrote:
| 100% agreed as I can't think of any one individual
| since(1) who has done as much for all of science and
| engineering as he ultimately did; alas, they are not
| awarded posthumously.
|
| (1) Newton would be a strong contender on a "for all
| time" basis, but even he would've probably needed to
| share it with Leibniz, which would have driven him
| absolutely ~b o n k e r s~, like wet hornet in a hot
| outhouse mad, LOL.
| eigenket wrote:
| von Neumann probably
| jampekka wrote:
| Neither of these models were never really influential though
| beyond some theoretical niches.
| drpossum wrote:
| Yup. This prize is indistinguishable from "we saw AI in all
| the headlines, let's see what's the most plausible reasons
| we could hand it out for that"
| wslh wrote:
| It seems like a hallucination generated from a ChatGPT
| prompt...
| aquafox wrote:
| "This year's laureates used tools from physics to construct
| methods that helped lay the foundation for today's powerful
| machine learning."
|
| Does this mean if I'd use a deep understanding of birds to design
| way more aerodynamic airplanes, I could get the Nobel prize in
| physiology/medicine? Don't get me wrong, their work is probably
| prize worthy, but shouldn't the Nobel prize in physics be awarded
| for discoveries in the _physical world_?
| vasco wrote:
| Everything in the universe is a tool from physics - taps head
| smugly.
| rurban wrote:
| Everything is either mathemetics or stamp-collecting (ie
| social sciences).
|
| Physics and chemistry are just applications of mathematics.
| mglz wrote:
| Hm, they have to fit them into Physics, Chemistry, Medicine,
| Literature, or Peace. I guess physics is the closest they can
| get without a gross missplacement? (Although you might be able
| to absue literature for LLMs?)
| mjburgess wrote:
| They dont have to give them a nobel prize. They have not
| advanced any of those areas.
| dietr1ch wrote:
| I think that you can grow mathematics through applied
| mathematics. It's something that grows the domain where
| Mathematics is useful, even though the maths themselves
| where known and somewhat well understood in a more abstract
| way.
|
| Considering this, it feels odd not to allow a similar thing
| to happen on physics.
| raincole wrote:
| It's definitely not how "they" work. It's not like a
| committee choosing an achievement across all the fields and
| then trying to put it into one of the 5 buckets.
|
| We have Turning Award, Fields Award and the other thousands
| of awards for achievements that can't be categorized as
| Physics/Biology/Economics/Chemistry.
| quantum_state wrote:
| The Turing Prize is for contribution in computing ... History
| would show this is not a good choice or taste of the Nobel
| Physics Committee ...
| kelahcim wrote:
| Kahneman was awarded Nobel prize in economic sciences even
| though his work was, in fact, all about psychology.
| dosshell wrote:
| Note that: There are no economic science Nobel prize.
|
| Only one similar named price in the name and memory of Alfred
| Nobel, which some how, is allowed to be part of the Nobel
| prize celebration.
|
| I guess my opinion is in minority, but i don't like that
| another prize hijacks the Nobel prize.
| nabla9 wrote:
| Boltzmann machines and associative memories originate in
| physics.
| okintheory wrote:
| But, the starting point of Neural Networks in the ML/AI
| sense, is cybernetics + Rosenblatt's perceptron, research
| done mathematicians (who became early computer scientists)
| nabla9 wrote:
| This is price in physics. Not price in Neural Networks.
| Starting point of Hopfield's and Hintons work in recurrent
| networks was physics analogy.
|
| Neural networks and physical systems with emergent
| collective computational abilities
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC346238/
| varjag wrote:
| Their work does not advance the field of physics in any
| way, unless you insist to extend physics to each and
| every discipline out there.
| nabla9 wrote:
| That's why I wrote that it was unexpected.I'm not taking
| position of if this was deserved or undeserved, but this
| was clearly in the realm of physics and inspired by it.
|
| Accepting wrong arguments in support of positions you
| have is not good way to live your life. It leads to
| constipation.
| seydor wrote:
| I studied physics in the 90s and we had an NNs course, where
| most of the models were inspired by physics (MLPs was just
| one). NNs have been used since decades for identifying e.g. the
| trajectories of particles at CERN. I remember Hinton's work
| with Sejnowski (who probably should also be awarded). I was
| actually surprised to find out that Hinton was not a physicist
| by training
|
| Obviously physicists take great interest in models of the brain
| or models of intelligence. All of physics is modeling , after
| all
| drpossum wrote:
| All of physics is modeling but not all modeling is physics.
| evandrofisico wrote:
| Not all modelling is physics, but a rather large part of
| modeling is. My PhD is in complex systems, and you would be
| surprised by the range of systems we did study. My work was
| on a more "traditional" field of high dimension fractal
| surfaces, but we had a student working on public transit
| models, another on ecological pattern formation, and so on.
| weinzierl wrote:
| At least the somewhat free interpretation of field boundaries
| is nothing new. The physicist Rutherford ( _" All science is
| either Physics or stamp collecting_")[1] won the Chemistry
| Nobel Prize.
|
| Influence and consideration of the Zeitgeist is also nothing
| new. Einstein got his prize for the discovery of the
| Photoelectric Effect and not Relativity.
|
| [1] I know that some people have interpreted this quote in
| favor of the other sciences but I think that is far fetched.
| eleveriven wrote:
| It highlights the evolving nature of scientific boundaries
| evandrofisico wrote:
| I _IS_ a physics problem. Non physicists tend of think that the
| only areas being studied are high energy and /or cosmology, but
| modern physics covers a multitude of areas, including complex
| systems.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| Complex non-physics systems?
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| Does that mean that computer scientists who do neural network
| research should be considered physicists? Do physics journals
| accept submissions on neural networks research under the same
| justification?
| bjornsing wrote:
| > Does this mean if I'd use a deep understanding of birds to
| design way more aerodynamic airplanes, I could get the Nobel
| prize in physiology/medicine?
|
| Yes I think it does. But those planes would have to create one
| hell of a buzz!
| keybored wrote:
| Plato: man is a featherless biped
|
| The Society for Birdology now has the pleasure of jointly
| awarding posthumously Plato and Diogenes with the Distinguished
| Birdologist Award. Their findings on human anatomy used
| insights from birdology at critical points. Well done, lads!
| hoseja wrote:
| Sweden Yes!
| isaacfrond wrote:
| Physics Nobel prize now also covers computer science, I guess.
| programjames wrote:
| Meh, neuroscience.
| sega_sai wrote:
| Physicist here. I'm sure Hinton deserves some sort of prize, but
| in Physics is really bizarre.
| jampekka wrote:
| He did get the Turing award already in 2018.
| Ma8ee wrote:
| I think this is the Royal Academy of Sciences way to admit that
| Physics as a research subject has ground to a halt. String theory
| suffocated theoretical high energy physics for nearly half a
| century with nothing to show for it, and a lot of other areas of
| fundamental physics are kind of done.
| mppm wrote:
| It really has not, though. There is more to physics than high-
| energy and cosmology, and there is no shortage of deserving
| contributions of smaller scope. It really is bizarre that deep
| learning would make it to the top of the list.
| Ma8ee wrote:
| Could you give me some examples of areas of fundamental
| physics that are vital and have done some significant
| discoveries lately? I genuinely would like to know, because I
| really can't think of any.
| eigenket wrote:
| "Vital" is completely subjective but I'd throw stuff around
| quantum information into the ring. Maybe you'd consider the
| loop-hole free Bell tests performed in 2015 and awarded the
| 2022 Nobel prize to count?
| Ma8ee wrote:
| I think the prize in 2022 was a nice prize, but it could
| still be considering just tidying the corners. In the end
| it just proved that things really work as most of us has
| thought it worked for decades.
| mppm wrote:
| I'm probably not the right person to ask, but off the top
| of my head: superconductivity of high-pressure hydrides;
| various quantum stuff like quantum computing, quantum
| cryptography, quantum photonics, quantum thermodynamics;
| topological phases; rare decays (double beta, etc.); new
| discoveries in cosmic rays, etc.
|
| My point was that physics is a big and active field,
| stagnation at the smallest and largest scales
| notwithstanding. Note also that the Nobel committee is not
| in any way limited to "newsworthy" stuff and has in many
| cases awarded prizes decades after the fact.
| eigenket wrote:
| 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 stuff from
| Jonathan Oppenheim and collaborators in the last couple of
| years.
|
| That said "physics" != "fundamental physics" and physics of
| composite systems ranging from correlated electron systems, and
| condensed matter through to galaxies and cosmology is very far
| from dead.
| 620gelato wrote:
| > 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 hasn't happened since 1972
| across any field)
| klwant wrote:
| One possibility is that they think this will access hype
| funding. Put "AI" in a physics paper and watch the grants
| roll in.
| eigenket wrote:
| I kinda doubt it. The kind of people who end up
| nominating people for Nobels or even making the decisions
| on these aren't really struggling for grant funding.
| noobermin wrote:
| String theory and the foundations are not the only area of
| physics. It would be nice for theorists to remember that.
| api wrote:
| My sense is that we might have reached the limits of what we
| can do in high-energy or fundamental physics without accessing
| energy levels or other extreme states that we currently can't
| access as they are beyond our capacity to generate.
|
| From what I've read (not a professional physicist) string
| theory is not testable unless we can either examine a black
| hole or create particle accelerators the size of the Moon's
| orbit (at least). Many other proposed theories are similar.
|
| There is some speculation that the hypothetical planet nine --
| a 1-5 Earth mass planet predicted in the far outer solar system
| on the basis of the orbits of comets and Kuiper Belt / TNO
| objects -- could be a primordial black hole captured by the
| solar system. A black hole of that mass would be about the size
| of a marble to a golf ball, but would have 1-5g gravity at the
| distance of Earth's radius.
|
| If such an object did exist it would be within space probe
| range, which would mean we could examine a black hole. That
| might get us un-stuck.
|
| If we can't do something like that, maybe we should instead
| focus on other areas of physics that we can access and that
| have immense practical applications: superconductivity,
| condensed matter physics, plasmas / fusion, etc.
| slashdave wrote:
| Although rare, there are cosmic rays that do span very high
| energies. You can access these from, for example, atmospheric
| showers.
| ngcc_hk wrote:
| Looking at history it is a bit odd that cosmic rays as high
| energy collider were not a field by itself.
| sampo wrote:
| > My sense is that we might have reached the limits of what
| we can do in high-energy or fundamental physics without
| accessing energy levels or other extreme states that we
| currently can't access
|
| How can we know, as past decades theoretical high-energy
| physics has studied made-up mathematical universes that don't
| tell much about our real universe. We haven't really given it
| that much of a try, yet.
| alwinaugustin wrote:
| Even Sheldon Cooper stopped researching string theory at one
| point.
| amai wrote:
| > Physics as a research subject has ground to a halt
|
| Max Planck was told by his professor to not go into Physics
| because "almost everything is already discovered". Planck said
| he didn't want to discover anything, just learn the
| fundamentals.
| Ma8ee wrote:
| First, I didn't say that I thought everything already was
| discovered, but that the fundamental physics community
| doesn't discover new things. That is due to how physics
| research is practiced today and has nothing to do with how
| much that is left to discover.
|
| Second, even if it obviously wasn't true when Planck was told
| that almost everything is discovered, it doesn't say anything
| about the state today.
| killerstorm wrote:
| What if the next breakthrough is complex and not directly
| accessible from our current state of math/physics thought?
|
| I see no reasons to expect steady progress. Nobody knows how
| long it would take to prove Riemann hypothesis, for example.
| pvitz wrote:
| Next year, the creators of Excel will get the prize, because it
| is an implementation of the mathematical universe.
| passwordoops wrote:
| You know what, I can support this for its predecessor,
| Lotus123. If ANNs are worthy of the prize in physics, then so
| is this
| jhbadger wrote:
| VisiCalc, surely. Lotus 123, much like Excel, was just
| following in the footsteps of the original spreadsheet.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisiCalc
| ngcc_hk wrote:
| This practical idea of spreadsheet has much more impact to
| society than many innovation. Nobel prize worthy.
| incognition wrote:
| Vbasic is Turing complete hah
| logicchains wrote:
| Imagine how Schmidhuber's feeling right now.
| bobosha wrote:
| haha!
| throwaway2562 wrote:
| Alas, poor Jurgen! I knew him, Horatio. A fellow of infinite
| jest, of most excellent fancy...
| beautifulfreak wrote:
| reference:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%BCrgen_Schmidhuber#Credit...
| versteegen wrote:
| That was my almost immediate reaction to the headline! Rarely
| credited but rarely forgotten.
| cubefox wrote:
| I'm sure he writes an article pointing all the errors in the
| official justification for the prize.
| sva_ wrote:
| Has anyone else won a Turing award as well as the Nobel prize in
| physics?
| protoman3000 wrote:
| This is not physics. Does that mean there was no Nobel Price
| worthy research happening in the field of physics?
| Urahandystar wrote:
| Looks like an award to increase the reputation of the Nobel
| prize. Similar to Obama receiving the peace prize then starting
| loads of wars.
| vichle wrote:
| Could you elaborate, which wars did he start? (honest question)
| ulkram wrote:
| "He launched airstrikes or military raids in at least seven
| countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia
| and Pakistan."
|
| https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-na-pol-obama-at-war/
| vichle wrote:
| Technically not the same thing but ironic/hypocritical
| nonetheless.
| medo-bear wrote:
| nah no way. i thought obama kool
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zmIUm1E4OcI
|
| so you can arguably add ukraine crisis to that list
| sekai wrote:
| > "He launched airstrikes or military raids in at least
| seven countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen,
| Somalia and Pakistan." https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-
| na-pol-obama-at-war/
|
| A bit different from "started a war".
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| Just because those countries could not realistically
| engage in a war with the US, seeing as they lack the
| necessary technology. Obviously, if you shoot fish in a
| barrel you're not starting a war with the fish, but that
| doesn't necessarily mean you're doing much to advance
| peace with the fish.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| If someone launched an airstrike against the continental
| US, what exactly would that mean?
| varjag wrote:
| So the Great War with Pakistan turns out to be _checks
| notes_ the raid on OBL compound?
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| Tangential to your question but not the premise of this
| subthread/post - he became president in Feb 2009 and got the
| award in October.
|
| I don't think he started any new wars, but he inherited some
| and continued. Anyway, the point here should be the absurdity
| of a lot of Nobel awards and that stands - especially in his
| case.
|
| I mean Trump was nominated for the award for fuck's sake!
| More than 2 or 3 times iirc. So anyway.
| matsemann wrote:
| The Nobel peace prize is awarded by a different institution
| than the science ones. And there are hundreds of people
| that can nominate, doesn't mean that a nomination reflects
| anything upon the committee that awards the prize.
| simiones wrote:
| Each of the Nobel prizes is awarded by a different
| committee from a different organization. The Nobel Peace
| prize was established at the same time and in the same
| way as the Literature, Physics, Physiology or Medicine,
| and Chemistry prizes (through Alfred Nobel's will). Of
| course, by its nature, it is the most political of the
| prizes.
|
| The only Nobel prize that is separate is the Economics
| one, which was established much later and has no
| connection to Alfred Nobel (it is paid for by Sweden's
| central bank instead of the Nobel estate). But even that
| one is administered by the same Nobel foundation.
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| Obama intervened in the Libyan civil war. The outcome was
| disastrous for Libya (13 years of chaos and counting, the
| entrance of ISIS into Libya, the re-emergence of slavery in
| Libya, to name a few consequences). Obama blatantly
| violated the War Powers Act, which requires the President
| to seek Congressional approval for any war waged abroad
| after 60 days. The act was passed on the tail end of the
| Vietnam War, to prevent a repeat of things like Nixon
| invading Cambodia in secret. The US Constitution gives
| Congress the power to declare war, but that power is
| absolutely meaningless if the President can just wage war
| wherever he chooses without a declaration.
|
| Obama specifically won the Nobel Peace Prize for talking
| about his "vision of a world free from nuclear weapons" as
| a candidate. As President, he initiated a massive program
| to upgrade the US' nuclear arsenal. It made a complete
| mockery of the Nobel Peace Prize, though Kissinger also won
| the Nobel Peace Prize, so it's not as if the prize has any
| credibility anyways.
| varjag wrote:
| The outcome was positive for Libya, as it experienced
| only a fraction of human suffering compared to Syria
| where the United States did not intervene against the
| regime.
|
| Either way Libya operation was spearheaded by France with
| Obama joining only reluctantly later.
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| The US intervened in both civil wars, though in Syria its
| involvement early on was much more through funding and
| arming of various armed groups - notably Sunni
| fundamentalist groups. How you can say that the outcome
| was positive for Libya is beyond me. The country was
| utterly destroyed. It went from being the one of the most
| developed countries in Africa to a war-torn country with
| competing warlords and open slave markets.
| varjag wrote:
| Human death toll in Libya and Syria differ by almost 60x.
| Half a million Syrians could have lived, the refugee
| crisis and the rise of far right in the West could be
| avoided had Assad been droned in 2013. Putin would also
| not have dared the 2014 annexation either.
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| The US had hundreds of thousands of troops on the ground
| in Iraq for over a decade. More than half a million
| Iraqis died. There was intense violence between different
| religious groups and political factions. But you come
| here and say that everything would have magically gotten
| better with more US involvement in Syria.
|
| A direct American intervention in Syria probably would
| have made things even worse. Droning Assad, as you
| suggest, probably would have led to an even greater
| amount of chaos (besides being totally illegal). It's bad
| enough as it is that the US funded Sunni extremists in
| Syria.
| mafribe wrote:
| Can you explain why starting a war (still ongoing),
| killing >10k people, and converting Africa's best
| functioning and richest country into one of the world's
| worst functioning places is positive outcome? I don't
| understand this.
|
| The Syrian Civil war was clearly (in parts) engineered by
| the west. Here is some evidence.
|
| - Western government spokesperson in 2003:
| https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/18328
|
| - In 2014, the West officially intervened in the Syrian
| civil war: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_intervention_
| in_the_Syrian_...
|
| - Western government spokesperson in 2018:
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-
| opinions/wp/2018/...
|
| - As of 2024 the West still has at least 1000 military
| personnel in Syria: https://theconversation.com/us-
| military-presence-in-syria-ca...
| varjag wrote:
| American military on the ground did not engage Syrian
| government forces except once in 2018 when they were
| attacked. They were there only for ISIS.
|
| See the sibling comment for human toll perspective.
| vasco wrote:
| Like it or not, one of the reasons Obama got the award was
| his campaign promise of withdrawing from Iraq. Guess who
| actually did it?
| Apocryphon wrote:
| You're mixing up wars.
| vasco wrote:
| https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-promised-
| withdr...
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Withdrawal_of_United_Stat
| es_...
| Apocryphon wrote:
| That's the second withdrawal from a second presence,
| requested by the Iraqi government after the rise of ISIL.
|
| > The United States completed its prior withdrawal of
| troops in December 2011, concluding the Iraq War.[9] In
| June 2014, the United States formed Combined Joint Task
| Force - Operation Inherent Resolve (CJTF-OIR) and re-
| intervened at the request of the Iraqi government due to
| the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant
| (ISIL).
|
| > On 9 December 2017, Iraq declared victory against ISIL,
| concluding the 2013-2017 War in Iraq and commencing the
| latest ISIL insurgency in Iraq.
|
| Perhaps those troops should have been withdrawn for the
| second time in early 2018. Alas, it took place after
| messier circumstances.
|
| > On 31 December 2019 through 1 January 2020, the United
| States Embassy in Baghdad was attacked in response to the
| airstrikes.[6] On 3 January 2020, the United States
| conducted an airstrike that killed Iranian Major General
| Qasem Soleimani and Kata'ib Hezbollah commander Abu Mahdi
| al-Muhandis.[6] Iraq protested that the airstrike
| violated their sovereignty.[13] > > In March 2020, the
| U.S.-led coalition, Combined Joint Task Force - Operation
| Inherent Resolve (CJTF-OIR), began transferring control
| over a number of military installations back to Iraqi
| security forces, citing developments in the multi-year
| mission against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant
| (ISIL).
|
| Or perhaps the second withdrawal has never actually
| completed.
|
| > In February 2021, NATO announced it would expand its
| mission to train Iraqi forces in their fight against
| ISIL,[14] partially reversing the U.S.-led troop
| withdrawals. In April 2021, U.S. Central Command stated
| that there were no plans for a total withdrawal of U.S.
| forces from Iraq, citing continued threats posed by the
| ISIL insurgency and Iran-backed militias.[3]
| dagw wrote:
| _I mean Trump was nominated for the award for fuck 's sake_
|
| Being nominated only means that one of thousands of people
| allowed to nominated candidates wrote your name on a piece
| of paper and mailed it in. There is at least one right wing
| Swedish politician who's been sending in Trumps name every
| year for a while now.
|
| The Nobel peace prize committee is not really responsible
| for nominating candidates[1], only for selecting a winner
| from the list of nominated candidates.
|
| [1] Although I believe they are allowed to suggest names.
| simiones wrote:
| In addition to the other replies, he is the only US president
| in modern history to explicitly authorize the assassination
| of a US citizen without a trial, and create a legal doctrine
| allowing future presidents to do so; and he was the major
| escalator of the use of drone strikes in war (the practice
| started with Bush, but it expanded many fold under Obama).
| jay-barronville wrote:
| > [...] [Obama] is the only US president in modern history
| to explicitly authorize the assassination of a US citizen
| without a trial
|
| Just one of the many things Obama did that upsets me so
| much. The precedent he set with that is criminal.
|
| Of course I'm against terrorism, but our government MUST
| NOT have the right to classify Americans as terrorists and
| just execute them without a trial--via drone strikes!
|
| Most Americans likely don't even know about what happened
| to the al-Awlaki's, which is unfortunate.
| Arkhaine_kupo wrote:
| 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 diplomacy were rewarded. He ultimately failed to reach
| those goals (specially with the escalation on Afghanistan and
| the emergence of groups like ISIS), but tbh the Iran agreement
| and the Pacific trade agreement, killed and buried by the next
| administration, would have created a massive buffer and
| solution for the 2 hotspots we currently experience around the
| middle east (where terrorism is largely sponsored by Iran) and
| the Taiwan takeover by the CCP (would also be partially
| neutralised by the Pacific trade talks).
|
| He was naive, in the way the world was naive to the ability to
| sacrifice prosperity that some leaders are capable of. He
| underestimated how dumb and suicidal putin could be, he
| underestimated how much China would be willing to sacrifice in
| terms of potential, he underestimated how much violence was
| latent and capable in the middle east. but his nobel peace
| prize was due to his campaign running on nuclear proliferation
| treaties and closer relationships with the muslim world which
| had been entirely antagonistic since Bush
| haunter wrote:
| > This is such a tired reply. The peace prize is not part of
| the same group as the other awards
|
| It's called a Nobel prize and it was established by the will
| of Alfred Nobel. So yes it's the same
| vasco wrote:
| The road to hell is paved with good intentions. The award
| shouldn't have been given for intentions, before he even did
| anything. We should not reward promises, but action. Even a
| long term member of the committee expressed regret in them
| giving it to Obama.
| acoupleofts wrote:
| > The least amount of wars in any century since WW2
|
| :/
| sph wrote:
| We still have a decade or so to get back to average
|
| Also, WW2 being so utterly destructive, back to back after
| an arguably even worse global war, skews the stats a
| little.
| ngcc_hk wrote:
| Ww1 is not a global war. The Asian and pacific theatre is
| not in play. It is mostly an European war.
|
| But it triggers ww2 because the treaty is too hard on
| Germany. And crazy people has its soil prepared for their
| madness.
| js8 wrote:
| > 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 be
| banned by treaties, to continue to pretend that MAD is
| actually required for peace. In reality many nations do not
| have nukes and live in peace.)
| Vecr wrote:
| It does work, you just need credible trigger thresholds for
| the salami tactics, treat tactical nukes as strategic, and
| have enough nukes to punch through ABM.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| He received it before any of that. And Libya does actually
| cancel every point you mention by the way. Because it's
| actually not hard to have presidents not start wars at all-
| both presidents since Obama did just that.
|
| And if the real Nobel prize doesn't want the confusion around
| its name to happen... it should do something about it?
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| 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 South East Asia have not found
| anyone nearly as inspirational as him from America since 2016
| and likely won't for awhile longer.
|
| Obama was awesome, and his legacy has been unfairly
| malingered. He was not the "warmonger" president that
| revisionists like to portray him as.
| hshshshsvsv wrote:
| That was the whole point of nobel prize in first place lol.
| okintheory wrote:
| Absolutely. This makes very little sense, IMO, and is a bad
| look for the committee, trying to claim 'physics' for something
| that clearly is not.
| ginko wrote:
| >Looks like an award to increase the reputation of the Nobel
| prize.
|
| If anything it stains the reputation of the Nobel prize to me.
| How seriously can you take the Nobel committee after this?
| bogtog wrote:
| I wonder if this'll help physics PhDs get industry jobs (I hear
| Myron Scholes is up for the 2025 prize)
| hellectronic wrote:
| You mean like the ones working on Wall Street?
| vasco wrote:
| If you google who Myron Scholes is you'll see the person you
| replied to made the same assertion already.
| aquafox wrote:
| "This year's laureates used tools from physics to construct
| methods that helped lay the foundation for today's powerful
| machine learning."
|
| Does this mean if I'd use a deep understanding of birds to design
| way more aerodynamic airplanes, I could get the Nobel prize in
| physiology/medicine? Don't get me wrong, their work is probably
| prize worthy, but shouldn't the Nobel prize in physics be awarded
| for discoveries in the _physical world_?
| programjames wrote:
| > Don't get me wrong, their work is probably prize worthy
|
| I would strongly disagree with you there. It's the exact same
| idea as the least squares approximation or conjugate gradient
| method: create an energy function from a quadratic and minimize
| it.
| cfcf14 wrote:
| So uh, things are not looking so good for actual physics these
| days, I gather?
| sva_ wrote:
| Interesting thought. I hear some voices saying theoretical
| physics is stuck with string theory, but am not really
| qualified to make a judgement.
| drpossum wrote:
| Physics is not stuck in string theory as physics is not just
| high energy theoretical particle physics. There's also more
| going on in high energy theoretical particle physics than
| just "string theory".
| Animats wrote:
| Much of the experimental action in recent decades has been
| in _low_ energy theoretical particle physics. Down near
| absolute zero, where quantum effects dominate and many of
| the stranger predictions of quantum mechanics can be
| observed directly. The Nobel Prizes in physics for 1996,
| 1997, 1998, 2001, and 2003 were all based on experimental
| work down near absolute zero.
| rty32 wrote:
| Nobel prize was awarded to theoretical work in 2021:
| https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2021/popular-
| infor...
|
| "theoretical physics" is such a big and ambiguous concept
| that physicists tend not to use the word in discussions.
| Thereotical work often involves a lot of numerical simulation
| on super computers these days which are kind of their own
| "experiments". And it is usually more productive to just
| mention the specific field, e.g. astronomy, condensed matter,
| AMO etc, and you can be sure there is always a lot of
| discoveries in each area.
| oefrha wrote:
| Former high energy theorist here: things are not looking so
| good for high energy physics (both theoretical and
| experimental) which loosely speaking accounted for maybe
| 1/3-1/2 of Nobel Prizes in the 20th century. That's part of the
| reason I got out. I'm inclined to say astrophysics and
| cosmology, another pillar of the fundamental understanding of
| the universe, isn't doing that well either, probably in the
| okayish but not as exciting as it used to be territory. I'm not
| qualified to talk about other fields.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| I think saying they're not looking good might be a bit of an
| exaggeration. Technological developments in both high energy
| physics and astrophysics stuff are in-between generations of
| technology right now, which is why things are a bit slower
| than usual.
|
| With astrophysics, we're probably going to need the more
| sensitive gravitational wave detectors that are in
| development to become operational for new big breakthroughs.
| With high energy physics, many particle colliders and
| synchrotron light sources seem to be undergoing major
| upgrades these days. While particle colliders tend to get the
| spotlight in the public eye and are in a weird spot regarding
| the expected research outcomes, light sources are still doing
| pretty well afaik.
|
| This Nobel I think is mainly because AI has overwhelmingly
| dominated the public's perception of scientific/technological
| progress this year.
| T-A wrote:
| > With high energy physics, many particle colliders and
| synchrotron light sources seem to be undergoing major
| upgrades these days.
|
| AFAIK synchrotron light sources are tools for materials
| science and other applied fields, not high energy physics.
| Did I miss something?
|
| I am also puzzled by the "many particle colliders". There
| is currently only one capable of operating at the high
| energy frontier. It's getting a luminosity upgrade [1]
| which will increase the number of events, but those will
| still be the 14 TeV proton-proton collisions it's been
| producing for years. There is some hope that collecting
| more statistics will reveal something currently hidden in
| the background noise, but I wouldn't bet on it.
|
| [1] https://home.cern/science/accelerators/high-luminosity-
| lhc
| dotnet00 wrote:
| >AFAIK synchrotron light sources are tools for materials
| science and other applied fields, not high energy
| physics. Did I miss something?
|
| When you put it like that, yeah, I was kinda being
| stupid. During my stint doing research at a synchrotron
| light source I was constantly told to focus on thinking
| like a physicist (rather than as a computer engineer) and
| most of the work of everyone who wasn't a beamline
| scientist was primarily physics focused, which is what
| led me to think that way. But you're right in that it
| might not make much sense for me to say that makes them
| high energy physics research tools first.
|
| >I am also puzzled by the "many particle colliders".
| There is currently only one capable of operating at the
| high energy frontier. It's getting a luminosity upgrade
| [1] which will increase the number of events, but those
| will still be the 14 TeV proton-proton collisions it's
| been producing for years. There is some hope that
| collecting more statistics will reveal something
| currently hidden in the background noise, but I wouldn't
| bet on it.
|
| The RHIC is also in the process of being upgraded to the
| EIC. But overall, yes, that's why I said they were in a
| 'weird' spot. I too am not convinced that the upgrades
| will offer Nobel-tier breakthroughs.
| nullindividual wrote:
| As a layman, the visualization of black holes, the
| superstructure above and below the Milky Way, JWST's distant
| galaxy discoveries, gravitational wave detectors as
| mentioned, and some of the Kuiper Belt observations all seem
| to be interesting and exciting.
|
| Oh and the death of string theory!
| juanjmanfredi wrote:
| What are you considering "high energy physics"? "1/3-1/2 of
| Nobel Prizes in the 20th century" is a significant
| overestimation unless you are including topics not
| traditionally included in high energy physics. For example,
| there were many Nobel prizes in nuclear physics, which shares
| various parallels with high energy physics in terms of
| historical origins, experimental techniques, and theoretical
| foundations. But nuclear physics is in a very exciting era of
| experimental and theoretical developments, so your "not
| looking so good" description does not apply.
| oefrha wrote:
| Much of nuclear physics was effectively "high energy
| physics" (or more appropriately named elementary particle
| physics) back in the day. They ceased to be elementary or
| high energy at some point. My very loose categorization is
| everything on the microscopic path towards the fundamental
| theories; and there's another macroscopic path, cosmology.
|
| Edit: Expanded a few times.
| optimalsolver wrote:
| Well I'm sure a $50 billion collider will fix things.
| fnands wrote:
| Please bro just one more collider. Just one more collider
| bro. I swear bro we're gonna fix physics forever. Just one
| more collider bro. We could go up or even underground. Please
| bro just one more collider.
| ghrqan wrote:
| What an odd rationale. Please do not devalue the Physics Nobel
| Prize to the status of the Nobel Peace Prize.
|
| This is overtly driven by expediency or business interests and
| ignores all societal problems.
|
| Be happy that you get your billions for CERN and keep a low
| profile.
| napa3uT wrote:
| this is a painfully accurate description of how we feel we are
| treated(CERN physicists that is) are you an ex colleague or
| something :)
| jwilk wrote:
| See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41775449 (> 40
| comments).
| kleiba wrote:
| This must piss Schmidhuber off like nothing else.
| raverbashing wrote:
| To the point of nuclear fusion even.
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| A very long and detailed blog post incoming. Spoiler alert: the
| Nobel prize should have been awarded to Godel/Hilbert (and
| Schmidhuber).
| kleiba wrote:
| Ironically, he _is_ cited in this article.
| karavelov wrote:
| Waiting for Sabine's comment: "Told you so, physics is dead"
| varjag wrote:
| Naturally she's not happy
| https://x.com/skdh/status/1843592351736050053
| lucaslucasluke wrote:
| Could you copy and paste her post in here? I'm brazilian and
| our STF overlords have decided that we shall not access
| twitter anymore
| hnfong wrote:
| The other comment (sibling of the one you replied to)
| already quoted the entire tweet. (Yes it's short and
| snarky.)
| noobermin wrote:
| "
|
| And the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics does not go to physics...
|
| "
|
| https://x.com/skdh/status/1843592351736050053
| noobermin wrote:
| May be I should know better, but is there no Nobel category for
| computer science or mathematics? This isn't physics, this is
| absolutely embarrassing. May be all those bitter elder physicists
| who didn't get a prize can feel a little justified in their
| derision of the institution.
| drpossum wrote:
| There no Nobel category for computer science or mathematics.
|
| Related reading
|
| https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/24/why-isnt-there-a-...
| eigenket wrote:
| Computer science has the Turing award and mathematics the
| Fields medal. Neither is exactly equivalent to the Nobel but
| they're similar levels of prestige.
|
| The Nobel prize fields and criteria are a bit random, they're
| essentially just whatever Alfred Nobel wrote in his will.
| dagw wrote:
| _they 're similar levels of prestige_
|
| Within their respective fields, not in general. What makes
| the Nobel so unique and desirable is that everybody knows
| what it is and is impressed by it. Mentioning that you've won
| a Nobel prize will impress people and open doors in virtually
| any circumstance. Saying you have a Turing award will mostly
| lead to blank stares from anybody outside the field.
| nxobject wrote:
| It also lets you co-host the Ig Nobels, if that's a more
| meaningful accomplishment to you.
| amai wrote:
| How about a "Nobel Memorial Prize in Computer Sciences" similar
| to the
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Econ...
| etiam wrote:
| Perhaps not a bad idea in that specific instance, but they're
| so embarrassed today about getting bought for the economics
| one that doing something similar again has become effectively
| out of the question (and on a balance I think that's for the
| best).
| programjames wrote:
| This is embarrassing. I would say Hopfield networks aren't even
| very revolutionary in neuroscience, but they're so old I can't
| tell. In terms of AI... they've been irrelevant for thirty years.
| I guess you could argue a transformer is a generalized Hopfield
| network, but of course that's a post-hoc understanding. None of
| this has anything to do with physics.
|
| So what if an energy function lets you approximate the number of
| macro-states it can capture? Should every mathematics paper with
| Lagrange multipliers be put up for nomination? Every poll that
| uses the law of large numbers, and thus, entropy? Surely the
| computer scientists building the internet need to be included as
| well, since their work is based in information theory.
|
| Or maybe, hear me out, we reserve the Nobel Prize in physics for
| advances in the physical sciences, understanding _physical_
| reality or how to bend it to our will.
| seewhydee wrote:
| Had they wanted a good ML relevant physics Nobel, the committee
| had decades to award a prize to Marshall and Arianna Rosenbluth
| for the Markov Chain Monte Carlo method. Would have been self-
| evidently important and relevant to both physics and ML. Too
| late now -- Arianna died in 2020.
| kenjackson wrote:
| Curious, would Peter Shor qualify? I struggle if his work is
| really just CS or enough physics to be in the discussion.
| jampekka wrote:
| There were some predictions that Peter Shor could win this
| year for quantum computation. I'd say his work is a lot
| closer to physics than Hinton's or Hopfield's.
| jampekka wrote:
| Neither Hopfield networks nor Restricted Boltzmann
| Machines/Deep Belief Networks really panned out for any
| purposes outside some theoretical niches.
|
| The prize was awarded for "AI" and the tenous links to physics
| of some irrelevant models are just an excuse.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| I agree this is rather bizarre.
|
| But let's not forget that the brain is a physical system and
| that neural networks are part of the reason we understand the
| brain as well as we do.
|
| There was a long period where people like Chomsky thought the
| brain couldn't learn fast enough and that knowledge had to be
| innate.
| kgwgk wrote:
| > neural networks are part of the reason we understand the
| brain as well as we do
|
| We don't understand much then.
| coliveira wrote:
| The goal here is to attribute a very important area in
| contemporary technology to physicists. This prize advances
| physics in terms of giving it higher importance in the minds of
| lay people and journalists.
| benrapscallion wrote:
| This is the only plausible reason:
|
| "These artificial neural networks have been used to advance
| research across physics topics as diverse as particle physics,
| materials science, and astrophysics," Ellen Moons, chair of the
| Nobel Committee for Physics, said at a press conference this
| morning.
| rvnx wrote:
| Must be, because in the field of artificial intelligence, if
| these techniques are not in production and considered
| obsoletes it's for a good reason.
|
| It may have been state-of-the-art in 1980s, but now is a bit
| late.
|
| Very smart people in their time though.
|
| In current times, a global prize to the transformers folks at
| least make more sense considering the context (despite it not
| being Physics).
| versteegen wrote:
| The landmark Deep Belief Networks (stacked RBMs) paper in
| Science was in 2006 [1]. DBNs were completely obsolete
| quite quickly, but don't deny the immense influence of this
| line of research. It has over 23k citations, and was my
| introduction to deep learning, for one. And cited by the
| Nobel committee.
|
| You're completely incorrect to say RBMs were of theoretical
| interest only. They have had plenty of practical use in
| computer vision/image modelling up to at least a few years
| ago (I haven't followed them since). Remember the first
| generative models of human faces?
|
| Edit: Wow, Hinton is still pushing forward the state of the
| art on RBMs for image modelling, and I am impressed with
| how much they've improved in the last ~5 years. Nowhere
| near diffusion models, sure, but "reasonably good". [2]
|
| [1] G.E. Hinton and R. Salakhutdinov, 2006, Science.
| "Reducing the Dimensionality of Data with Neural Networks"
|
| [2] "Gaussian-Bernoulli RBMs Without Tears"
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/2210.10318
| jovial_cavalier wrote:
| Many wrenches and powertools were essential in building the
| LHC, but they didn't give the prize to Black & Decker or
| DeWalt either.
| jampekka wrote:
| And medicine and literature and chemistry and war. Maybe
| they'll get all the prizes?
| lr1970 wrote:
| Honestly, I am stunned by today's Nobel committee announcement.
| Hinton's Boltzmann machine is a clever construct that nobody,
| repeat nobody, in the AI and ML is using anymore in actual
| practice.
|
| EDIT: add minor clarification.
| ks2048 wrote:
| Next: Authors of "Attention is all you need" paper get Nobel
| Prize in Literature for writing one of the most read papers in
| past decade.
| pavlov wrote:
| Bob Dylan already won that prize to similar controversy.
| oefrha wrote:
| Nobel Prize in Literature has always been controversial. It
| seems that the Physics Prize is headed that way (it's not
| just this year)...
| agomez314 wrote:
| this is the best comment
| hnfong wrote:
| I think the Nobel Prize in Literature for "the most copied
| paper title" seems a better justification.
|
| The first page of google for "Hopfield Networks" is " _Hopfield
| Networks is all you need_ ". No kidding...
| RandomLensman wrote:
| Maybe just scrap the categories and have set or prizes for
| whatever sort of advanced humanity the most?
| elashri wrote:
| As a physicist, my reaction to this is how bizarre is that. Maybe
| he deserves a nobel prize but in physics?
|
| Also arguing that NN is used in physics so we can argue nobel
| prize is okay is like asking for Stephan Wolfram to be awarded
| Nobel prize for Mathematica which is much more used in physics as
| a tool. And he is a physicist and had contributions to the field
| of numerical relativity (The reason he created Mathematica in the
| first place).
|
| The royal science academy fucked up so much with this choice.
| amelius wrote:
| It feels a bit like the field of physics claiming the invention
| of AI, where we all know that mathematics and/or CS deserve the
| honor.
| alkonaut wrote:
| I think the Nobel prize doesn't want any scientific advance
| to fall _outside_ the range of awards entirely.
| meindnoch wrote:
| >where we all know that mathematics and/or CS deserve the
| honor
|
| Or semiconductor manufacturers.
|
| All the math and CS needed for AI can fit on a napkin, and
| had been known for 200+ years. It's the extreme scaling
| enabled by semiconductor science that really makes the
| difference.
| jampekka wrote:
| TBF backpropagation was introduced only in the 1970's,
| although in hindsight it's a quite trivial application of
| the chain rule.
|
| There were also plenty of "hacks" involved to make the
| networks scale such as dropout regularization, batch
| normalization, semi-linear activation functions (e.g. ReLU)
| and adaptive stochastic gradient descent methods.
|
| The maths for basic NNs is really simple but the practice
| of them is really messy.
| miven wrote:
| Residual connections are also worth mentioning as an
| extremely ubiquitous adaptation, one will be hard-pressed
| to find a modern architecture that doesn't use those at
| least to some extent, to the point where the original
| Resnet paper sits at over 200k citations according to
| google scholar[1].
|
| [1] https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_cit
| ation&h...
| cma wrote:
| Highway nets introduced them in the 90s
| programjames wrote:
| > All the math and CS needed for AI can fit on a napkin,
| and had been known for 200+ years.
|
| This isn't really true. If you read a physics textbook from
| the early 1900s, they didn't really have multivariate
| calculus and linear algebra expressed as concisely as we do
| now. It would take several napkins. Plus, statistical
| mechanics was quite rudimentary, which is important for
| probability theory.
| cubefox wrote:
| That's absurd. The computer science needed for AI has not
| been known for 200 years. For example, transformers were
| only invented in 2017, diffusion models in 2015.
|
| (When the required math was invented is a different
| question, but I doubt all of it was known 200 years ago.)
| zmgsabst wrote:
| I don't think calculus existed at sufficient rigor 200
| years ago.
|
| Computer science wasn't even a thing 100 years ago.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| Calculus has been around for quite some time.
|
| If Newton had the machinery to fit large models to data,
| he would have done so. No doubt.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| Cauchy's main work was under 200 years ago; and there's
| been quite a lot of work since.
|
| Again, I'm unsure that calculus existed at sufficient
| level 200 years ago -- it didn't appear in modern form
| from either Leibniz or Newton.
| cubefox wrote:
| Someone changed the Wikipedia article today to call Hopfield
| a "physicist". Previously the article called him simply a
| scientist, because his main work wasn't limited to physics. I
| changed it back now, let's see if it holds up.
| xanderlewis wrote:
| It's 'physicist' again now.
| oefrha wrote:
| The Nobel Committee doesn't represent the field of physics. I
| talked to a few former colleagues (theoretical physicists)
| just now and every one of them found this bizarre.
| lr1970 wrote:
| By this definition Claude Shannon (the father of Information
| Theory) clearly deserves a Nobel in Physics. The central
| concept in Information Theory is Entropy which is defined
| literally the same way as in Physics. And Shannon's Information
| Theory clearly revolutionized our life (tele-communications)
| much more than Hopfield network or Hinton's Boltzmann machine.
| drpossum wrote:
| Fun historical fact: Claude Shannon did win the Noble prize
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Noble_Prize#Recipients
| elashri wrote:
| That's different local prize by the American society of
| civil engineers.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Noble_Prize
| drpossum wrote:
| Yes. That's the joke.
| hnfong wrote:
| [party pooping] It would have been better delivery if you
| said " _a_ Nobel prize " instead of " _the_ ".
| thw09j9m wrote:
| Noble != Nobel
| hnfong wrote:
| Ah my bad.
| lr1970 wrote:
| In 1939 Claude Shannon won the "wrong" Nobel prize -- The
| Alfred Noble Prize award presented by the American Society
| of Civil Engineers [0]. It causes a lot of confusion.
| Claude Shannon never won a "real Nobel".
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Noble_Prize
|
| EDIT: typos
| rramadass wrote:
| Right; the Nobel Committee has officially "jumped the shark".
|
| Reminds me of the old classic _Physics and Politics by Walter
| Bagehot._
| yreg wrote:
| > Maybe he deserves a nobel prize but in physics?
|
| Which category fits better?
| huijzer wrote:
| In some sense it makes sense to award AI researchers on behalf of
| the physics community because I know many physics PhD's who thank
| their job to AI; they work as data scientist now.
|
| Jokes aside, physics is a bit stuck because it's hard to do
| experiments at the boundaries of what we know, as far as I
| understand. So then it makes sense I guess to award people who
| made useful tools for physics.
| openrisk wrote:
| > it's hard to do experiments at the boundaries of what we know
|
| this applies primarily to fundamental physics. There are many
| areas of applied physics (materials, fusion, biophysics,
| atmospheric physics, etc. etc.) where the main constrain is
| understanding complex systems. These areas are quite crucial
| for society.
| hoseja wrote:
| As evidenced by the search for room temperature low pressure
| superconductors.
| cha42 wrote:
| Or toothpath dynamic.
| alwinaugustin wrote:
| 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
| matsemann wrote:
| 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.
| amai wrote:
| How about a "Nobel Memorial Prize in Computer Sciences" similar
| to the
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Econ...
| ginko wrote:
| Why though? The Turing award exists.
| og_kalu wrote:
| People often say that the Turing award is the Nobel Prize of
| computing but that's not really true. The Turing award is the
| most prestigious award in computing yes but that's not enough
| for Noble like recognition/pedigree.
|
| What makes the Nobel prize unique is that almost anyone, even
| the general public or pioneers in other fields etc can here
| you received one and be very impressed. You'll generally be
| met with blank stares if you told anyone not in computing or
| an enthusiast you'd won a Turing. Even if you then said,
| "It's the most prestigious award in computing!", it wouldn't
| hit the same.
|
| Awards like these are basically only really worth their
| social recognition, so it's no surprise people would still
| want a Nobel in Computing/Mathematics etc even with
| Turing/Field etc existing.
| kgwgk wrote:
| > They have already been awarded prizes for [..] peace
|
| Since 1901.
| anonymousDan wrote:
| What a bunch of BS, yet another field trying to steal the thunder
| of CS. How often have I had to listen to physicists sneer at CS
| as not a proper science!
| napa3uT wrote:
| thanks the feeling is mutual since comp scientists sneer at
| physicists too, just for other reasons
| anonymousDan wrote:
| Really? Why would comp scientists sneer at physicists?
| nabla9 wrote:
| 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. Unexpected, but saying this is not physics is
| not correct.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Also double descent was discovered already by physicists in
| 80s-90s
| archmutant wrote:
| In curious what's the context for this?
| xqcgrek2 wrote:
| The methods may be inspired by physics, but they have made no
| contribution to understanding physical laws or phenomena.
|
| It's mathematical/CS work. The connection to actual physical
| laws or phenomena is even more tenuous than the prize for
| exoplanets a few years ago.
|
| The Nobel prize physics committee has made itself a joke, and
| probably destroyed the credibility of the prize.
| parodysbird wrote:
| > but they have made no contribution to understanding
| physical laws or phenomena.
|
| Neural networks are used in tons of data pipelines for
| physics experiments, most notably with particle accelerators.
|
| The Nobel Prize is also occasionally awarded to engineers who
| develop tools that are important parts of experiments. 2018
| for example was awarded for chirped pulse amplification,
| which is probably best known for being used in LASIK eye
| surgery, but it is also used in experimental pipelines.
| empiko wrote:
| The techniques highlighted in this prize are not really
| that useful for deep learning.
| etiam wrote:
| You mean besides bringing it into existence at all?
| sudosysgen wrote:
| They did not bring it into existence. The MLP is older
| than the Hopfield network. The invention that made it
| practical was back propagation, which wasn't used here at
| all.
| empiko wrote:
| Please explain how Hopfield network influenced modern
| deep learning models based on supervised differentiable
| training. All the "impactful" architectures such as MLP,
| CNN, Attention, come from a completely different
| paradigm, a paradigm that could be more straightforwardly
| connected to optimization theory.
| hnfong wrote:
| > Neural networks are used in tons of data pipelines for
| physics experiments
|
| With this argument you could even say Bill Gates should get
| an award for inventing Windows and popularized the desktop
| computer... Or at least Linus Torvalds since those
| pipelines are probably running Linux...
| parodysbird wrote:
| No you couldn't. Windows doesn't have any bearing on
| outcomes, whereas machine learning methods directly
| impact the data and probability inference.
| slashdave wrote:
| Yeah, well, those pipelines are running on HPCs that are
| using linux. Particle physicists kind of hate Windows.
| twic wrote:
| So if they used a genetic algorithm, they could have got the
| prize for biology?
| dawnofdusk wrote:
| There is no nobel prize for biology
| dawnofdusk wrote:
| Agree completely, being in this field.
|
| However, it is weird for the committee to give a prize for
| theoretical physics without an experiment. It is doubly weird
| when they already made this "mistake" in 2021 with Parisi, who
| was the odd one out among the geophysicists, and are giving
| another prize in spin glass/stat phys... why?
| nabla9 wrote:
| In summary, it's definitely related to physics, but kind of
| weird choice.
|
| Why David Sherrington and Scott Kirkpatrick did not share the
| price for the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick model? Hopfield is
| referencing their work?
|
| Multiple theoretical physicists working with black holes
| (Hawkin's and others) didn't get Nobel, because black holes
| were not confirmed or theory could not be tested.
| snitty wrote:
| Chemists everywhere are wondering where this furor has been for
| the forty years or so.
| nullhole wrote:
| Physicists stole the chemistry prize, now computer scientists
| are stealing the physics prize, I guess
| GistNoesis wrote:
| Since most papers nowadays are written by AI, and peer reviewed
| by AI, it only seemed logical for AI to be used by the Nobel
| committee to award the godfather of AI.
|
| Thanks to AI, you now only have to to ask any GPT for the source
| code of the universe to get the code. Since physics is now a
| solved problem, we should recenter ourselves on more important
| questions like why did AI create the universe ?
|
| Hopefully AI will have an answer soon.
| T-A wrote:
| For what it's worth, the "Advanced information" PDF does a
| somewhat better job of trying to explain the rationale than the
| linked press release:
|
| https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2024/09/advanced-physicsp...
| amai wrote:
| Interesting. LeCun, Bengio, Schmidhuber and Hochreiter are
| (amongst others) also mentioned in this article.
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| Eagerly waiting for Schmidhuber's comment on the prize.
| ricksunny wrote:
| Thanks for finding/providing that link. p.10
|
| "Highly sought-after fundamental particles, such as the Higgs
| boson, only exist for a fraction of a second after being
| created in high-energy collisions (e.g. ~10-22 s for the Higgs
| boson). Their presence needs to be inferred from tracking
| information and energy deposits in large electronic detectors.
| Often the anticipated detector signature is very rare and could
| be mimicked by more common background processes. _To identify
| particle decays and increase the efficiency of analyses, ANNs
| were trained to pick out specific patterns in the large volumes
| of detector data being generated at a high rate._ " (emphasis
| mine)
|
| It concerns me reading stuff like this (one can find similar
| for the original LIGO detection of gravitational waves) without
| accompanying qualification. B/c I want to hear them justify why
| it shouldn't sound like 'we created something that was trained
| to beg the question ad nauseam'. Obvs on a social trust basis I
| have every reason to believe these seminal discoveries are
| precisely as reported. But I'd just like to see what the stats
| _look_ like - even if I 'm probably incapable of really
| understanding them - that are able to guarantee the validity of
| an observation when the observation is by definition _new_ ,
| and therefore has never been detected before, and therefore
| cannot have produced an a priori test set (outside of
| simulation) baseline to compare against.
| mjburgess wrote:
| I've always sided with Feynman on this, and this proves him
| right: wtf do these people think they are appointing themselves
| fit to hand out trinkets and baubles on behalf of global
| scientific achievement?
|
| It brings the award into disrepute, or at least in a Feynman way,
| exposes the inherent disreputability of awards themselves: who
| are they to award such a prize on behalf of physics?
|
| Awards committees: self-serving self-appointed cliques of
| prestige chasers
| _zamorano_ wrote:
| Altough of course you're right, let's play devil's advocate an
| imagine a world without Nobel prices.
|
| Laypeople needs a simple way to know who's who in advanced
| research fields, without Nobel prices (or any other commitee)
| we don't get to have that.
|
| If people gets to ignore (more) such topics, it's likely
| politicians, and universities react accordingly, and funnel
| funds to other enterprises.
|
| All these prices (I'd say writing prices are much worse) are
| typically super corrupt, but at least keep the field in people
| minds.
| danielbarla wrote:
| The economics of this topic have always been interesting to
| me, especially when compared to various other fields. What is
| there to incentivize people to enter STEM fields, and
| especially research?
|
| As a point of comparison, there are ~540 premier league
| football players, with an average salary of 3.5 million
| pounds. (Yes, that's average, not median, but there's less
| than 20 of them that earn under 200k.) It's not _that_
| exclusive of a club, and the remuneration is insanely
| disproportionate, compared to academics - I highly doubt
| there are hundreds of researches earning millions.
|
| So, yes, it's pretty odd to have some random people dish out
| these prizes, and they are a drop in the pond. However, I
| personally feel it's way too little, and that the targets of
| the prizes are far more deserving - even if it's a popularity
| contest - than random entertainers (even if they are quite
| entertaining). But, it's up for argument, and the markets
| obviously don't seem to agree with me.
| aeonik wrote:
| If Physicists could split atoms with only their arms and
| legs with some safety equipment, I bet they would get paid
| even more than 3.5 million pound salary.
| ben_w wrote:
| Splitting atoms? Nah, that's the easy one, you can do
| that yourself even if you're quadriplegic and in a coma.
|
| Even fusion is high school science fair stuff.
|
| Spallation, antiprotons, quark gluon plasmas? Now you're
| talking.
| elashri wrote:
| If this was true then we would find that jobs with
| physical labor pays much more than what it currently
| pays.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| Weirdly, if you sniff the XHR from [0] (when it loads a new
| page), it claims there's 1171 players for 24/25. Except if
| you look at a few of the teams individually, they're
| between 30-35 players. Which is much more in line with your
| ~540 than their 1171.
|
| > the remuneration is insanely disproportionate
|
| I once pointed out that Kevin De Bruyne, on his own, gets
| paid almost half as much (~21M) as the entire salary cap of
| the Rugby Union Premiership (~2022, 50M) (to make the point
| there's much more money in football than rugby.)
|
| [0] https://www.premierleague.com/players
| psb217 wrote:
| "I highly doubt there are hundreds of researches earning
| millions." -- by doing purely academic research, maybe not.
| But, the number of people who have moved from academia to
| industry off the strength of their research and made
| millions is probably much larger than you think. I'd wager
| just in ML you could round up a few hundred between OpenAI,
| Anthropic, Google/DeepMind, NVidia, Meta/FAIR, etc.
| drpossum wrote:
| > Laypeople needs a simple way to know who's who in advanced
| research fields
|
| What need of a layperson does knowing "who's who" in advanced
| research fields fill?
|
| Here's another good question related to that: Who is
| qualified to simplify that so that the need is filled?
| jovial_cavalier wrote:
| They need to know, to sate the egos of physicists.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| >> Laypeople needs a simple way to know who's who in advanced
| research fields, without Nobel prices (or any other commitee)
| we don't get to have that.
|
| I think first you're underestimating "laypeople" which seems
| to include many scientists who are not physicists, and second
| you are forgetting that many of the scientists the "lay"
| public knows as the greatest of all times never received a
| Nobel, or any other famous prize: Einstein, Newton, Kepler,
| Copernicus, Galileo, etc etc.
| sehansen wrote:
| Einstein received the Nobel prize in 1921, but your point
| is still correct.
| Maxatar wrote:
| Einstein received the Nobel prize:
|
| https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1921/summary/
| myrmidon wrote:
| Neither for relativity nor mass-energy equivalence
| though, which laypeople are _much_ more likely to know
| about than the photoelectric effect (what the price was
| actually awarded for).
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| Ah. My mistake. Thanks for correcting me.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Do laypeople know Kepler?
| etiam wrote:
| Depends on the quality of the '"lay" public' I guess.
|
| Where I live, in my estimation the ' _educated_ "lay"
| public' would probably have heard of all the names
| mentioned, but with even worse notions of what their
| actual contributions were for Kepler.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Google scholar rankings of conferences or individuals by
| H-index or citations is a perfect way for both lay people and
| academics to measure each others achievements.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| And who are the Oscar's to give out awards to movies?
|
| You can hand out the MJBurgess awards for non-NN-related
| physics today!
| mjburgess wrote:
| That goes to the latest work by researches in Gaussian
| processes, of course.
| atonse wrote:
| Even though the many of the Oscars nowadays feel rigged (with
| full lobbying arms from the studios behind them), my
| understanding was that the "Academy" (from the Academy
| Awards) consists mostly of your fellow filmmakers.
|
| So it is an honor bestowed by your peers, the ones who would
| most appreciate the quality of the work and the work that
| went into it.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| It does look like the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences is
| mostly professors: https://www.kva.se/en/about-
| us/members/list-of-academy-membe...
| tycho-newman wrote:
| In the old days, you'd get a knighthood or a peerage for such
| achievements.
|
| But honestly, I'd still prefer cash.
| sorenjan wrote:
| > wtf do these people think they are appointing themselves fit
| to hand out trinkets and baubles on behalf of global scientific
| achievement?
|
| https://www.kva.se/en/prizes/nobel-prizes/the-nomination-and...
|
| https://www.kva.se/en/about-us/members/list-of-academy-membe...
|
| > who are they to award such a prize on behalf of physics?
|
| They're not awarding anything in the name of physics, they're
| awarding a prize in the name of the Nobel committee.
| openrisk wrote:
| 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) have got us to some sort of tipping point, undermining our
| very ability to act according to our best long-term interests.
|
| ps. not to imply anything negative about the worthiness of the
| awardees in general
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| There'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.
| cosmic_quanta wrote:
| I can only think of major achievements in my (narrow) field of
| study.
|
| What do you think could have reasonably been awarded?
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| Three off the top of my head:
|
| The measurement of the Hubble constant using delay times
| between multiple images of lensed supernovae.
|
| The first transit spectrum of an exoplanet atmosphere.
|
| The first directly imaged exoplanet.
|
| (They could hand out Nobel Prizes in the field of exoplanets
| like candy.)
| xqcgrek2 wrote:
| Exoplanet science is not physics, it's chemistry or
| planetary science. By your logic prizes to teams who send
| probes to the outer solar system planets could also be
| given prizes.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| What's "exoplanet science"? The above are applications of
| knowledge of physics to astrophysics, as far as I
| understand it. Certainly they sound more relevant to
| physics than neural networks.
| bfmalky wrote:
| Ok, so under what logic does ML become physics?
| cosmic_quanta wrote:
| I would argue that the first measurements of exoplanets'
| existence is definitely physics. This was a leap in our
| understanding of the makeup of the universe.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Alfred Nobel's stated standard for a prize is:
|
| "conferred the greatest benefit to humankind"
|
| So while those things are cool and groundbreaking, I'd say
| they have yet to cross the threshold into "greatest benefit
| to humankind"
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| If you define "benefit to humankind" narrowly, and don't
| view gaining pure knowledge about the workings of the
| universe as beneficial to humanity, then most physics
| Nobel Prizes over the last few decades fail the test.
|
| Detecting gravitational radiation from the merger of two
| black holes was an incredible step forward for our
| understanding of the universe. It will not practically
| change your life in any way.
| nodfyr wrote:
| The computation of the cosmic microwave background
| fluctuations hasn't received a nobel prize yet. It's had a
| deep impact on how we understand the Universe.
|
| Some people still alive who made important contributions to
| this are Rees and Sunyaev.
| topaz0 wrote:
| Something for nonequilibrium statistical mechanics
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| > a slap in the face to the physics community
|
| The physics community could use a few more slaps in the face,
| according to many physicists.
| mhh__ wrote:
| The response of the physicists they say should get a slap is,
| in programming terms, basically shut up and show me the code.
| It's a fairly one sided debate that we're blessed with seeing
| in literally every thread anywhere about it
| underlines wrote:
| Here's a resounding 'slap' delivered by one physicist to his
| peers:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBIvSGLkwJY
| datavirtue wrote:
| This is like that sidebar you have with someone after you
| have joined a series of meetings and listened intently and
| have all these nagging suspicions and you are in denial
| about people who you think could not possibly be talking
| this much nonsense because they clearly should know more
| than you. A few seconds into the sidebar the person tells
| you that everyone is full of shit, and you find relief in
| that you were actually understanding everything you were
| hearing and yes, you were drawing the right conclusions.
| hcks wrote:
| Could you please list say the top 5 Nobel worthy achievements
| of this backlog
| amusedcyclist wrote:
| Yeah this is absolutely disgusting tbh, revising my opinion of
| all previous nobels way down now
| tombert wrote:
| 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.
| shombaboor wrote:
| the fields medal fills that gap
| tombert wrote:
| Yeah, and the Turing Award for CS, and there's probably a
| bunch more that I'm forgetting.
|
| Still kind of weird that the prestigious award that
| everyone has heard of doesn't have a mathematics category.
| shombaboor wrote:
| the nobel prize has the best branding and name brand
| recognition pop culture wise. I'm sure winning all these
| others means nearly as much to those communities.
| lukasga wrote:
| The story is that it is because Alfred Nobel was cheated on
| by a mathematician (hilarious, but unconfirmed)
|
| http://nobelprizes.com/nobel/why_no_math.html#story
| aDyslecticCrow wrote:
| 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).
| Findecanor wrote:
| If a new prize is added, it would need its own funding. The
| five original Nobel Prizes are funded by interest from the
| fortune that Alfred Nobel left behind. The economics prize
| is funded by the Swedish central bank, and is therefore
| officially _their_ prize "in memory of Alfred Nobel", not
| a "Nobel Prize" as such.
| tombert wrote:
| > 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).
|
| I'm not sure I agree with that. There's plenty of
| theoretical computer science that isn't really
| "engineering" and would fall into a pretty different
| category than stuff like FFT or Navier Stokes.
|
| If you look at something like Concurrency Theory, for
| example, and work with stuff like Pi Calculus or CSP or
| Petri Nets, those aren't "engineering feats", but also kind
| of fall into a different category than the rest of math, or
| at least pretty different than Navier Stokes. I think you
| could make a pretty strong argument that CSP has been a
| pretty big innovation in regards the academic state of the
| art while not simply being engineering.
| aDyslecticCrow wrote:
| Let me add RSA, Elliptic curves, Runge-Kutta, Finite
| element analysis, and Hamming codes to the list.
|
| I would still consider CSP, Petri Nets, and Pi-Calculus
| mathematical enough to be wrapped under a mathematics
| price if they're influential enough. The first true
| computer scientists were mathematicians, and I still feel
| that much of the theoretical work in the field is closer
| to "mathematics useful for computers" than its separate
| field.
|
| In the spirit of the nobel price, "mathematics with the
| greatest humanitarian impact" leaves plenty of room for
| the inclusion of influential pieces from theoretical
| computer science, especially as those prices within
| mathematics that do exist already include loads of
| mathematics that require computers to prove or solve.
| tombert wrote:
| > I would still consider CSP, Petri Nets, and Pi-Calculus
| mathematical enough to be wrapped under a mathematics
| price if they're influential enough.
|
| I guess, but they certainly feel categorically different
| than something like Runge-Kutta. They're more about the
| study of algorithms, which is generally where I've drawn
| the line of "computer science vs math".
| drpgq wrote:
| I'm surprised someone hasn't done it similar to the economics
| award that came later.
| canjobear wrote:
| I understand the frustration, but a lot of Geoff Hinton's
| foundational work was based on physics principles. For example
| https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/1993/file/9e3cfc48eccf8...
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| Information theory, which is foundational to computing, has
| some mathematical similarities to statistical mechanics. That
| doesn't make it physics.
| gandalfgreybeer wrote:
| My adviser's PhD dissertation (PhD Physics) has Hopkins as one
| of her major references. This is grounded in Physics.
| krishnasangeeth wrote:
| Turing award and now Nobel prize in physics, something which he
| would have never expected. What an amazing career!
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| "The Nobel Prize for Stuff We Think is Cool."
| deepnet wrote:
| As a former Alumni of Hinton's MOOC I can attest to his humble,
| kind nature and clarity, & erudition as a teacher.
|
| Modelling learning as entropy, and heat in his Boltzmann machines
| was genius as was the 1980s backdrop paper.
|
| Geoff tirelessly evangelised neural nets and machine learning
| right from his 1970s phd days at Edinburgh.
|
| Despite being in the academic wilderness during the many decades
| of symbolic AI.
|
| Moore's law ( & parallel processing via GPUs ) finally caught up
| with Geoff's vision and proved him right.
|
| Well deserved !
| ak_111 wrote:
| The contrast in discoveries made in 'core' physics in the first
| 25 years of the last centuries compared to this century is quite
| insane, it was never going to be sustainable. If it did sustain
| we would be colonising a new galaxy by now.
|
| Consider that in 1900 the atom wasn't discovered yet, within
| around 25 years the basic principles of quantum physics were
| established, to say nothing about discoveries in cosmology (GR +
| big bang).
| meindnoch wrote:
| Baffling. If this isn't a sign of a major crisis in physics, then
| I don't know what is.
| amai wrote:
| Peak AI Hype! Winter is coming!
| rory_h_r wrote:
| I like to imagine this is for the 80s AI hype and another one
| will come out in 40 years for ChatGPT.
| pyb wrote:
| Maybe the story here isn't so much whether Hinton is a physicist
| or not, but rather a lack of groundbreaking progress in physics
| to give the Nobel to.
| eleveriven wrote:
| A profound moment where physics, neuroscience and artificial
| intelligence intersect.
| seydor wrote:
| very little to do with neuroscience
| Separo wrote:
| Except that the development of deep neural networks took
| direct inspiration biological neuroscience with neurons and
| synapses. Neural is even in the name.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_learning
| raincole wrote:
| still, very little to do with neuroscience
| littlestymaar wrote:
| It was a source loose of inspiration for sure, but it still
| have nothing to do with neurosciences.
|
| "Neural" network are as close to actual nervous system as
| the "Democratic" Republic of Korea is to democracy.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Well, come on, not that far apart.
|
| When I see someone trying this hard to be smart I just
| hear "REEEEEEEEE" or "Well actually......"
| elcomet wrote:
| You're mistaken. The perceptron was invented by
| Rosenblatt, a psychologist. This field has deep roots in
| neuroscience.
| scarmig wrote:
| McCulloch and Rumelhart were psychologists as well.
| almostgotcaught wrote:
| People always repeat these stupid things like they're
| lore. Ok let's suppose this is true. What else is true is
| that neurology itself was inspired by phrenology and the
| practice of exorcisms. Should we now start recognizing
| and exalting those connections given how divorced modern
| (useful!) neurology is?
| SkyBelow wrote:
| Major distinction given those practices have been
| abandoned as pseudo science or even worse, so they aren't
| fields of science continued to be developed which further
| useful connections might be found.
|
| In psychiatry, there is a certain amount that we continue
| to study social standards of normalcy in other (including
| historic) societies to determine what should count as a
| mental disorder, but more to make sure we aren't doing a
| 21st century equivalent of labeling something as a demon
| possession because it contrasts with our current deeply
| held social norms.
| scarmig wrote:
| Hinton's most recent paper on forward-forward
| acknowledges Peter Dayan explicitly for his feedback on
| the paper, and cites a paper they cowrote together back
| in the 90s. Dayan being the author of the canonical
| textbook on theoretical neuroscience.
| SkyBelow wrote:
| >nothing to do with
|
| So what is the meaning of to do with and nothing to do
| with? Inspiration seems to be a relationship.
|
| Consider a different relationship between cellular
| biology and the Cells at Work anime. Clearly any
| relationship is unidirectional. Any cellular biology
| learns nothing from the anime, but the anime wouldn't
| exist without cellular biology.
|
| Do we say the show has nothing to do with cellular
| biology? That doesn't seem right to me, given it depends
| upon it despite taking an amazing degree of artistic
| freedom.
| seydor wrote:
| Actually iirc the first deep architectures that Hinton
| trained were restricted boltzmann machines
| Insanity wrote:
| I'm actually not sure why this is being downvoted? Is it
| actually incorrect and if so, where did it take inspiration
| from?
| Maxatar wrote:
| The downvotes are very unusual to say the least. All the
| historical material on the subject unambiguously points
| to neural networks emerging from work done to formalize
| actual brain neurons. That formalism turns out not to be
| a great way to explain biological brains but the
| abstraction it provided proved highly effective for tasks
| like pattern recognition, classification, and decision
| making.
|
| So much about computer science has been inspired from
| other fields such as biology. Polymorphism and object
| oriented programming, reification, neural networks and in
| particular convolutional neural networks, genetic
| algorithms...
|
| If anything, it teaches the value in learning a topic and
| then applying it directly within computer science. The
| strength of computer science lies in its ability to adapt
| and incorporate ideas from other domains to push the
| boundaries of technology.
| seydor wrote:
| DL did not take 'direct inspiration' from neurosciences.
| Maybe some ideas were borrowed such as the integrate-and-
| fire nature of neurons and Hebb's very vague rule, but
| those are very old ideas. Most of neuroscience research in
| past decades is in molecular biology , and particularly in
| the study of neural diseases (that's where all the funding
| goes). Learning and biological plasticity is notoriously
| complex and difficult to study, it's still very much
| undeciphered, and none of that plasticity research has made
| its way into ANN training.
|
| In fact it is the reverse: the recent success of deep
| learning has sparked a race in neuroscience to try to find
| processes in the nervous that might mimic deep learning and
| in particular to build biologically plausible models about
| how the brain might implement gradient descent or more
| generally credit assignment.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| Very little to do with physics.
| comment423 wrote:
| More to do with neuroscience than you think. Fukushima took
| direct inspiration from Hubel & Wiesel's nobel prize in the
| 1960s when developing the neocognitron, which turned into
| convolutional neural networks. Hopfield networks are a model
| for associative memory. And, well, then there is the
| perceptron. There was always a link and mutual inspiration.
|
| Recommended reading: Lindsay, G. W. (2021). Convolutional
| neural networks as a model of the visual system: Past,
| present, and future. Journal of cognitive neuroscience,
| 33(10), 2017-2031. https://direct.mit.edu/jocn/article-
| abstract/33/10/2017/9740...
| aDyslecticCrow wrote:
| As inspiration, yes. However, a neural network neuron and a
| biological neuron are, to modern understanding, entirely
| unrelated.
| canjobear wrote:
| They're not identical but they are related. There's a
| series of approximations and simplifications you can go
| through to get from biological neurons to neural nets.
| Essentially the weights in the neural net end up
| corresponding to steady-state firing rates of populations
| of spiking neurons. See for example Chapter 7 of Dayan &
| Abbott's Theoretical Neuroscience.
| DanielleMolloy wrote:
| Discussing the right levels of abstraction is a huge
| thing in computational biology. At what level is 'the
| algorithm' of natural computation implemented?
| dboreham wrote:
| At the very least neuroscience provides an "existence proof".
| Somehow this stuff must be possible using some sort of
| trained machine comprising a large number of simple
| components...
| whymauri wrote:
| It's funny because I learned about Hopfield multiple times in
| neuroscience classes, but never once in an EECS/ML course.
| eterevsky wrote:
| To be fair, Nobel Prize has a history of expanding the
| traditional bounds of respective fields when awarding the prizes:
|
| Bertrand Russel got the Nobel prize in literature
|
| Daniel Kahneman got Nobel in economics
| moralestapia wrote:
| Bob Dylan on literature was another "hmm" one.
|
| Not against nor in favor, it was just an unexpected awardee.
| tycho-newman wrote:
| Bob Dylan is the Boomer poet laureate.
| raincole wrote:
| War criminials got Nobel prize in peace.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Which were you referring to?
| yostrovs wrote:
| Yasser Arafat is one
| llm_trw wrote:
| Kissinger another.
| frob wrote:
| Also Barack Obama. It's hard to be POTUS without
| commiting war crimes.
| dagw wrote:
| Do be fair to the Nobel committee, he commit his
| purported "war crimes" after getting the prize.
| llm_trw wrote:
| He also got it for being half black since by the cutoff
| date he'd been president for all of 11 days. Had they
| waited a year they would have had the pleasure of finding
| out he ordered 50% more drone strikes than Bush did.
|
| Content of his character indeed.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| We're well into flame war territory here, so I apologize,
| and am treading carefully.
|
| The list of war crimes I can pin on US during that time
| is mostly indefinite imprisonment in Guantanamo _if_ you
| allow for the efforts Obama made to reduce torture.
|
| https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/01/09/barack-obamas-shaky-
| lega...
|
| Drone strikes are not war crimes according to this
| definition:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crime#Definition
| brap wrote:
| Probably Yasser Arafat
| bilbo0s wrote:
| Aung San Suu Kyi?
|
| There's quite a few.
| aerhardt wrote:
| Winston Churchill got a Nobel in literature, too.
| TMWNN wrote:
| Yes, but for his _History of the English-Speaking Peoples_ ,
| and more broadly, for his lifetime as an author.
|
| (Admittedly, even more broadly, the prize was the Nobel
| Committee wanting to acknowledge his leadership in WW2, but
| still.)
| kuschku wrote:
| The economics prize is not a Nobel prize.
| iandanforth wrote:
| "Although not one of the five Nobel Prizes established by
| Alfred Nobel's will in 1895, it is commonly referred to as
| the Nobel Prize in Economics, and is administered and
| referred to along with the Nobel Prizes by the Nobel
| Foundation. Winners of the Prize in Economic Sciences are
| chosen in a similar manner as and announced alongside the
| Nobel Prize recipients, and receive the Prize in Economic
| Sciences at the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony."
|
| - Wikipedia
| lyu07282 wrote:
| It's propaganda for liberalism. It's just that at a certain
| point that propaganda became so successful, that you sound
| like a lunatic if you call it propaganda. Unfortunately
| there was no reason to make propaganda for Mathematics so
| they never got their own Nobel prize.
| mannykannot wrote:
| That's all true, but it doesn't do anything to diminish my
| suspicion that there is a fair amount of coattail-riding
| behind it.
| gwervc wrote:
| Don't forget Barack Obama for absolutely no valid reason.
| TechDebtDevin wrote:
| Hey he got the Peace Prize for conducting a war in the middle
| east!
| splintfrog89 wrote:
| Real physics and its resulting breakthrough technologies have
| been hidden from society for a very long time. And so they simply
| need _somebody_ they can give that price to.
| gyre007 wrote:
| This reminded me of my Hopfield networks implementation in Go
| [1]. The algorithm is rather simple but fascinating nevertheless
| and works surprisingly well for reconstructing noisy images. I
| actually blogged about it as well [2]. But as many are discussing
| here Deep Memory networks based on Boltzmann networks are more
| powerful yet they don't seem to have found much use case either
|
| [1] https://github.com/milosgajdos/gopfield [2]
| https://cybernetist.com/2017/03/12/hopfield-networks-in-go/
| aborsy wrote:
| Terrible. Hopfield networks nobody cares about, and few heard of?
| kwar13 wrote:
| In physics...?
| barrenko wrote:
| Well, the easiest way to enter the ML field is to pivot from
| theoretical physics.
| VHRanger wrote:
| Geoffrey Hinton wins the Nobel prize in physics for giving
| physics postdocs more reasonable job market options
| alsodumb wrote:
| Lol I almost choked laughing at this lmaoo
| holmesworcester wrote:
| ...than finance
| auntienomen wrote:
| It's been a generation since it was easy to go into
| finance from physics.
| EXHades wrote:
| lol,All for employment
| fnands wrote:
| And as an ML engineer with a PhD in physics I can tell you
| that I am deeply grateful that I didn't have to go the
| postdoc route.
|
| I know we are joking around here, but damn, just for that
| alone I'm happy that he got it.
|
| For whether it is actually physics? That I'll leave for
| another discussion.
| scarmig wrote:
| 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...
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Eh, I doubt Hinton would have won if he hadn't turned to
| alarmism in his dotage. The prizes are as political these
| days as they are scientific.
| dekhn wrote:
| 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.
| wing_rets wrote:
| The actual process of computation, sure, but machine
| learning was born from physics-based methods and
| applications to understand complexity and disorder.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Math, Logic, Epistemology, et al are not "subfields of
| physics" - The other way around is more likely.
| frotaur wrote:
| 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 intuitively 'logical'. But this
| intuition cannot be disentangled from physics, as it was
| a product of physics.
| theGnuMe wrote:
| I would agree.. But it took Computer Scientists to put
| neural networks on the map by getting them to scale.
| Basically by asking the question _what_ happens if we turn
| it up to 11.
|
| Statisticians would never have done that due to parsimony
| and something something Bayesian.
|
| Engineers would never have done it, nor mathematicians
| either.
|
| It took Computer Scientists because it is computation.
| ahdhdixud wrote:
| Ok, now I understand why this is a notable achievement in
| physics
| physicsguy wrote:
| This is totally bizarre, no precedent for it really. The reality
| of the prize means that less and less are the winners names every
| physicist has heard of, but even today they're still big names in
| each subfield. For e.g. Kosterlitz, Thouless and Haldane weren't
| exactly household names but they really deserved the prize in
| 2016.
|
| In this case, there's a good argument that Hopfield had conducted
| strong work as a physicist and in physics, but Geoffrey Hinton
| has never worked as a Physicist, at best adopting some existing
| things from physics into cognitive science use cases. In any
| case, what they've been given the prize for is work where they've
| not contributed to the understanding of the world of physics -
| it's not even really an arguable case where this is work that
| crosses over between Physics and another field either. It'd be
| like if Black or Scholes had been given the Physics prize rather
| than Economics because their famous equation can be re-written in
| Schrodinger equation form.
| ianbicking wrote:
| Bob Dylan got a Nobel prize in literature, which feels
| something like a precedence.
| ngcc_hk wrote:
| The key is field. A physicist use maths will not get maths
| prize if just use it for physics.
|
| He use words and its lyrics has meaning, like any literature.
| Cannot say poetry is not literature. Then why not poetry with
| music, probably more traditional as many poems are songs. In
| some culture, it must be singable.
|
| These use physics but not in the field of physics. Otherwise
| anyone use qm can get Nobel prize and chemistry people can
| get one as they all use physics. Really need to be in the
| physics field. You can use other method like computer, maths.
| Separo wrote:
| Well maybe in time ML will help break through the high energy
| physics roadblocks.
| elashri wrote:
| One of the very early successful applications of ML was using
| neural network and other models in particle identification
| systems in particle physics experiments.
| moelf wrote:
| 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.
| seanhunter wrote:
| 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 won the physics prize.
|
| Even when they get it right they often get it wrong. For
| example I believe Einstein supposedly won for "especially his
| work on the photoelectric effect" rather than relativity.
| moelf wrote:
| >Einstein supposedly won for "especially his work on the
| photoelectric effect" rather than relativity.
|
| just adding to this, this is because relativity wasn't
| experimentally verified (i.e. not sure if it's reality) at
| the time.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| Also, the prize is about the greatest benefit to
| humankind according to Alfred Nobel, not the most
| impressive research. Arguably, the photoelectric effect
| fits that notion better than GR or any other of
| Einstein's research.
|
| Besides that, Einstein received the prize in 1921,
| whereas the Eddington experiment in 1919 generally counts
| as the first experimental verification of GR.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > Arguably, the photoelectric effect fits that notion
| better than GR or any other of Einstein's research
|
| Today we could argue about it due to the importance of
| solar panels, but that was hard to forecast in 1921.
| Also, without GR there would be no GPS so it's not like
| it doesn't bring benefits to humanity.
| topaz0 wrote:
| More to the point, photoemission spectroscopy has been a
| workhorse tool for understanding the electronic
| properties of materials for quite a long time now (though
| perhaps not yet in 1921).
| mr_mitm wrote:
| Einstein laid the foundation of quantum mechanics with
| his description of the photoelectric effect, so you could
| add transistors, lasers, LEDs, CCD sensors and more to
| the list. Although I agree that it's doubtful that most
| of this could have been foreseen then.
| zellyn wrote:
| Surely they would have just noticed a discrepancy in
| timing and added a few circles-upon-circles to
| effectively fix it up? Is deeply grokking relativity
| necessary for GPS to work?
|
| On the other hand, it would be impossible to make those
| adjustments without someone coming up with GR :-)
| jonstewart wrote:
| Not supposedly.
|
| "for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially
| for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect"
|
| https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/lists/all-nobel-prizes-
| in-...
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| Nobel prizes are generally awarded for verifiable
| observations but, also require real world applications.
|
| Einstein won the physics prize on the photoelectric effect
| due to having real world applications and observable and if
| GPS actually existed while he was arrived (yes I know this
| is a stretch) he would have gotten it for relativity.
|
| Blue LEDs allows you to access more of the color spectrum
| for LEDs in general and they were not easy to make.
|
| For this year it does feel like a very large leaning into
| practical applications instead of physics though. Did we
| run out of interesting physics in the last year?
| DoughnutHole wrote:
| Einstein's work on the photoelectric effect was incredibly
| important, and incredibly influential on other research at
| the time. He proposed that light was quantised -
| essentially the foundation of quantum mechanics.
|
| It's no exaggeration that Einstein's work on the
| photoelectric effect was as important as special or general
| relativity, and it had the advantage of strong experimental
| verification by 1921.
|
| The main reason that prize is remarkable is that Einstein
| himself hated quantum mechanics - but that doesn't dispute
| the work's importance.
| topaz0 wrote:
| I would add to this that it had the advantage of
| something like 40 years of history as a field that was
| the basis for some of the biggest advances in
| instrumentation of that era.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Oh come on, blue LEDs were a feat of physics and chemistry
| mastery.
| seanhunter wrote:
| I'm sure they are but they drive me nuts. If I ever
| become filthy rich and in doing so sell my soul and
| become a bad person, one of my priorities will doubtless
| be to have the blue led inventors hunted down
| remorselessly.[1]
|
| [1] Note to future law-enforcement: I am honestly
| kidding. I wouldn't hurt a fly, officer.
| mozball wrote:
| A black sharpie over the offending led indicators will
| fix that. Now you can enjoy your sleep uninterrupted by
| dreams of manhunts and mephistophelian bargains.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| 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.
| ilya_m wrote:
| I would add to this list Bernard Russel who won the Nobel
| in literature for being a public intellectual.
| nickpeterson wrote:
| I should take up being a public intellectual, instead of
| a public nuisance.
| mmooss wrote:
| Most people on the Internet and in a certain orange forum
| might consider it seriously. (I do think about it
| myself.)
| telotortium wrote:
| Maybe it's a prize for hope and change that physics will be
| revolutionized by neural networks? Similar to how Obama got a
| Nobel Peace Prize in order to repudiate Bush's legacy in Iraq
| and Afghanistan. While Bush's legacy absolutely deserved to
| be repudiated, I don't think awarding a new president the
| Peace Prize was the best way to do it, especially because in
| the foreign policy realm, he ended up not so different from
| Bush.
| henrikschroder wrote:
| Maybe read the announcement?
|
| "With their breakthroughs, that stand on the foundations of
| physical science, they have showed a completely new way for
| us to use computers to aid and to guide us to tackle many
| of the challenges our society face. Simply put, thanks to
| their work Humanity now has a new item in its toolbox,
| which we can choose to use for good purposes. Machine
| learning based on ANNs is currently revolutionizing
| science, engineering and daily life. The field is already
| on its way to enable breakthroughs toward building a
| sustainable society, e.g. by helping to identify new
| functional materials. How deep learning by ANNs will be
| used in the future depends on how we humans choose to use
| these incredibly potent tools, already present in many
| aspects of our lives"
| slashdave wrote:
| How about a prize for the Monte Carlo simulation methods
| needed as input to these models?
| ww520 wrote:
| ML absolutely has helped astrophysics in sorting the massive
| amount of observation data to make new discovery.
| bnegreve wrote:
| Most disciplines in CS have done that one way or another.
| Yizahi wrote:
| 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.
| ww520 wrote:
| No. Because the keyboard while faster is not instrumental
| in finding new stars. ML is instrumental in finding new
| stars and new planets.
| OneDonOne wrote:
| So do telescopes. Has anyone every won a Nobel for a
| telescope?
| hildolfr wrote:
| People have won it over new microscope designs and
| techniques.. possibly telescopes, too.. but I'm less
| familiar with that and not somewhere where it's convenient
| to look it up.
| OneDonOne wrote:
| In 1986 and 2014, science (electron optics,
| nanoscopy/nanolasers) came first. Then the _microscopy_.
| Even 2017 won for 3D microscopy. What Nobel-worthy
| physics does thing do?
| slashdave wrote:
| If I may be so bold, a breakthrough will require new
| experimental techniques, and we aren't likely to get those from
| ML.
| chrsw wrote:
| Hinton was never going to win the Nobel Prize while working for
| Google, right?
| behnamoh wrote:
| are you saying that's part of his reason to leave Google?
| chrsw wrote:
| That's my suspicion, yes.
| rvnx wrote:
| The age too, and the fact that Google lost prestige in AI
| over the years.
|
| It's the company that didn't see the potential of
| Transformers, and that presented a half-assed Bard when
| LLMs were already in production in other companies.
| behnamoh wrote:
| But Hinton was not in favor of LLMs anyway, he argued
| backprop is not what the brain does and that we should do
| better than these models. I'd say Google would be a great
| place for someone thinking like that.
| querez wrote:
| what makes you say/think that?
| chipdart wrote:
| > Hinton was never going to win the Nobel Prize while working
| for Google, right?
|
| This conspiracy theory makes no sense. Nobel prizes are awarded
| based on someone's life's work.
| chrsw wrote:
| I think calling it a conspiracy theory is a bit of a stretch.
| I could be wrong. I agree that's how it should be. But I
| don't get the impression there are lot of fans of Google in
| the Prize Committee. Either way, it's not something that
| matters too much. Just a thought.
| chipdart wrote:
| > I think calling it a conspiracy theory is a bit of a
| stretch.
|
| It's the textbook definition of a conspiracy theory, isn't
| it? I mean, a group conspiring to not awarding the most
| prestigious prize in science to someone who deserved it
| because of who their employer was, and suddenly awarding it
| once he switched employers?
|
| > But I don't get the impression there are lot of fans of
| Google in the Prize Committee.
|
| This is a conspiracy-oriented line of reasoning. Who
| anyone's employer was is something that never surfaced when
| discussing Nobel prizes. Suddenly it became the basis of a
| theory on how people conspired to first not award it and
| afterwards award it, and somehow the guy's accomplishments
| don't even register in the discussion.
|
| That's what these conspiracy theories bring to the table.
| chrsw wrote:
| I get what you're saying. I have no evidence and no
| inside information. It could be a conspiracy, but I doubt
| it. It could just be multiple individuals independently
| being uncomfortable with tacitly approving a huge company
| they see as potentially responsible for privacy problems,
| ethics problems and AI misuse. I don't see these as
| invalid concerns either. And I don't see being conflicted
| about giving an award to an employee of a company tied to
| big ethical concerns as anti-science or having a lack of
| integrity.
|
| Discovering breakthroughs in machine learning is a
| profound achievement and deserves to be recognized.
| Wielding powerful tools against humanity for the sake of
| money, not so much. But, like I said, I could be dead
| wrong, and this is probably why I wouldn't be a good
| person to serve on one of these committees.
| numpad0 wrote:
| I genuinely think there is potential for a silly Internet
| tradition here. Google should pick bunch of candidate winners
| by ML, hire them six months before, fire them all a week before
| awarding, and then programmatically re-hire moments before
| awarding. It can't be more malicious than most academic pranks
| and it shouldn't matter whether the conspiracy is real, it'll
| be just funny.
| chronolitus wrote:
| Moreso genuine curiosity than as a gotcha: A lot of comments are
| saying this was the wrong choice. I'd find it really interesting
| to hear who the nomination should have gone to instead, in your
| opinions.
| tgv wrote:
| They are not under an obligation to award the prize. They could
| have just said "sorry, we can't think of anyone."
| mishaevtikhiev wrote:
| 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 of Hinton and Hopfield were really informed by physics
| (which is a dubious link to the Nobel prize anyway), the argument
| stops holding water at all.
|
| 2. Some of the comments mention that giving prize for works in AI
| may make sense, because physics is currently stalled. This is
| wrong for several reasons: 2.1. While one can argue that string
| theory (which is, anyway, only a part of high-energy theoretical
| physics) is having its "AI winter" moment, there are many other
| areas of physics which develop really fast and bring exciting
| results. 2.2. The Nobel Prize is often awarded with quite some
| delay, so there are many very impactful works from 80s which
| haven't been awarded with a Nobel prize (atomic force microscopy
| is a nice example). 2.3. It is wrong to look at the recent
| results in some sub-field and say "okay, there was nothing of
| value in this field". For example, even if one completely
| discards string theory as bogus, there were many important
| results in theoretical physics such as creation of conformal
| field theory, which was never recognized with a Nobel Prize
| (which is OK if Nobel Prize is given to other important physical
| works, but is quite strange in the light of today's
| announcement).
|
| To finish on a lighter mood, I'll quote a joke from my friend,
| who stayed in physics: "Apparently the committee has looked at
| all the physicists who left academia and decided that anything
| they do is fair game. We should maybe expect they will give a
| prize for crypto or high-frequency trading some time later".
| fooker wrote:
| > 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 better chips, rocket propulsion, etc etc is going
| to get a nobel prize pretty quickly similar to mRNA.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| Those two buckets only contain the work in physics that have
| a sustained presence in popular media. But take gravitational
| wave astronomy as a counterexample. It doesn't make it into
| the news much, but I'm pretty sure the entire field is less
| than ten years old.
| codethief wrote:
| > most physics
|
| That's an interesting definition of "most physics". I mean, I
| find high-energy physics as fascinating as the next guy but
| there are other fields, too, you know, like astrophysics &
| cosmology, condensed-matter physics, (quantum) optics,
| environmental physics, biophysics, medical physics, ...
| hsuz wrote:
| I'd rather they withhold the prize this year, if there isn't
| really anything interesting happening in physics.
| worstspotgain wrote:
| When the most significant advance since electrification needs to
| hop the fence to be recognized, perhaps it's time to add a new
| field. It can be done, the Economics prize was added in 1968.
| ogogmad wrote:
| Nice idea. You could also have a Nobel prize in applied
| mathematics, perhaps? This would cover ML and physics.
|
| That said, your idea would make physicists less outraged.
| Etheryte wrote:
| This is unlikely to ever happen, because Nobel explicitly
| excluded mathematics from the list of prizes in his will.
| There are plenty of awards and prizes for every field
| imaginable, not everything has to be a Nobel prize to be
| worthy of recognition.
| InDubioProRubio wrote:
| Then again, its just mathturbation, but standalone and it can
| pretend to have a theory of everything, so fits well into the
| field.
| amarcheschi wrote:
| I like this idea, after all math is its own field of study.
| We might call it "field prize" or something like that (this
| comment is just a pun)
| wslh wrote:
| Sincerely, I don't like a shadow cast over the Turing and Godel
| prizes. These awards have long honored groundbreaking
| achievements in computing and logic.
| pantalaimon wrote:
| the economics prize is not 'official', it was established by
| the Swedish National Bank in honor to Alfred Nobel.
| NlightNFotis wrote:
| I see this written a lot, and I don't get it.
|
| What matters for an award is that people recognise it as a
| prestigious accolade.
|
| The economics prize, while not "official", is still
| recognised by everyone in economics as the highest honour in
| the field. Who cares if it's "official" or not?
|
| Awards and prizes derive their value from their social
| recognition, which it has a solid amount of, at the very
| least.
| worstspotgain wrote:
| One could even argue it has all of the benefits and less of
| the dynamite scent.
| NlightNFotis wrote:
| Depends on how much you consider that particular odour
| offensive :)
| Maken wrote:
| There is nothing wrong with their connection with
| dynamite. Nobel designed it to prevent deaths in
| construction and mining, because nitroglycerine was way
| too dangerous (and way too useful to be abandoned). It's
| bad reputation comes from it's use in warfare, which is
| undeserved because it was not very well suited to that
| use and was quickly replaced by other solid explosives.
| jfengel wrote:
| Do they get to go to the ceremony with the other laureates,
| meet the king, etc?
|
| Of course that doesn't matter to anybody else, but I could
| see it mattering to the laureates themselves.
| tzs wrote:
| > Do they get to go to the ceremony with the other
| laureates, meet the king, etc?
|
| Yes.
| etiam wrote:
| The significance is that it's not a Nobel prize. Saying
| that is simply formally wrong. It's a prize lobbied in
| (with a hefty donation) almost 70 years after the
| establishment, trying to raise the status of Economics as a
| scientific discipline by basking in the reflected glory of
| the actual Nobel prizes.
|
| You may not care about the distinction, and if so that's
| your prerogative, but this Memorial prize in Economics,
| despite sharing in the festivities, is not in the same
| category and that's what you keep running into seeing
| pointed out.
| og_kalu wrote:
| The General Public and Economists hold it in the same
| regard as other Nobel Prizes so appeal to 'formality' is
| pointless. The social recognition is the point of these
| awards so if it has that and is also often called the
| "Nobel Prize in Economics" then it's a Nobel Prize.
| They're literally announced and awarded together.
|
| Nobody but a few nitpicks care about your distinction
| because it's not a real one. Might as well say "Money is
| not valuable because the material it's made up of has
| little intrinsic value". Well no, Money is valuable
| because society has decided it is.
| etiam wrote:
| It is also my prerogative not to care about your opinion.
| You claimed you come across this a lot and don't get it.
| I just told you. Take it or leave it.
| og_kalu wrote:
| >It is also my prerogative not to care about your
| opinion.
|
| Sure
|
| >You claimed you come across this a lot and don't get it.
| I just told you. Take it or leave it.
|
| I'm not OP. And i don't think a few comments on Nobel
| prize threads is a lot in the first place. Nothing for me
| to "take".
| etiam wrote:
| Apologies to NlightNFotis for implicitly accusing you of
| being the griefer. I replied quickly between other tasks
| and evidently didn't pay due attention to the username. No
| misplaced offense intended.
| antientropic wrote:
| The economics prize is listed on nobelprize.org ("the
| official website of the Nobel Prize") along with the other
| Nobel prizes, so I don't think you can justify calling it
| "unofficial".
|
| Perhaps if the ACM renamed the Turing Award to "The Alfred
| Nobel Memorial Prize in Computer Science", the Nobel
| Foundation would let them get away with it.
| tzs wrote:
| That makes it sound like it has no connection to the other
| prizes.
|
| It's awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, who
| also award the Physics and Chemistry prizes. Its winner is
| announced with the winners of the original prizes. The winner
| in included in the annual Nobel Prize Award ceremony in
| Stockholm, and receives a medal, diploma, and monetary grant
| award document from the King of Sweden at that ceremony. The
| Nobel Foundation counts it when they say their are 6 prize
| categories, and includes its winners on their lists of Nobel
| laureates.
|
| It only differs from say the Chemistry prize in that it was
| established in memory of Nobel instead of by Nobel and the
| prize money doesn't come from Nobel's estate.
| jedrek wrote:
| The economics prize is not an actual Nobel prize, but something
| "inspired" by the Nobel prize. It's little more than a tool to
| push neoliberal policies to the public, with 34 of the 56
| winners tied to the Chicago School of Economics.
| hm236 wrote:
| IMO Turing Award is plenty prestigious - and has more
| legitimacy as its awarded by the relevant community (ACM) -
| rather than some small group (the Swedish Academy of Sciences)
| - tbh on that vein I'd say the right thing to do is to ditch
| the Nobel and let each community in the relevant field decide
| as a community the work to honor - prevent fiascos like this.
|
| (and, working in the field, I completely disagree with the
| qualification as "most ...." - it has well known deficiencies
| and has not yet stood the test of time)
| jebarker wrote:
| > most significant advance since electrification
|
| I just don't see how this can be claimed at this point.
| shiandow wrote:
| 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.
| jebarker wrote:
| 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!
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| Congrats to the laureates! Maybe a Computing prize should be
| created though, like Nobel did not create the "nobel prize of
| economy".Though you could argue that Computing is Math? What are
| computer scientists usually awarded with?
|
| edit: s/rewarded/awarded
| jvanderbot wrote:
| I think there's some backlash against a google-able answer
| here.
|
| However, from memory the list of biggest awards for CS/Math
| are:
|
| Fields medal
|
| Abel prize
|
| Turing award
|
| Godel award
| amarcheschi wrote:
| Kanellakis award too for theoretical cs
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Kanellakis_Award
| seanhunter wrote:
| I don't think Geoff Hinton is in the running for a Fields
| medal[1] any more, unless they did what they did for Andrew
| Wiles and give him a "quantized" Fields medal.
|
| [1] You have to be under 40. https://www.fields.utoronto.ca/a
| boutus/jcfields/fields_medal...
| nybsjytm wrote:
| Hinton was never in the running for a Fields medal since he
| never made a single contribution to the field of
| mathematics. His work is about empirical discoveries in CS.
| astura wrote:
| >What are computer scientists usually rewarded with?
|
| The Turing Award is considered by most to be the highest award
| in computer science.
| jprete wrote:
| Hinton already won a Turing award, so this Nobel just seems
| doubly absurd.
|
| I hope he turns it down, but it's a monetary prize too and it
| takes a lot of dedication to science to turn it down.
| FredPret wrote:
| Isn't he a socialist?
| Vecr wrote:
| Doesn't matter. He wants to work on AI risk, right?
| FredPret wrote:
| Unsure of your point - I meant he doesn't believe in
| provate property, so the prize money shouldn't be a
| factor.
|
| If he truly believes what he says he believes.
| Vecr wrote:
| Because you can use money to do things? Even if you don't
| want private property after AGI, you need it now.
| FredPret wrote:
| Believing that you can do a better job of allocating your
| Nobel prize money than a central authority is free-market
| thinking.
|
| If he's a socialist, he should donate all his property to
| the government, including the entire prize money.
| Vecr wrote:
| Isn't the standard AI doom position that the government
| taking control just kills everyone a few years later? The
| money would be for research, not welfare or whatever the
| government would use it for.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| Oh yeah! I forgot about this one! Extremely prestigious in CS
| but less known by the public unfortunately.
| bjornsing wrote:
| Honestly it feels a bit weird with a Nobel laureate in physics
| who probably knows a lot less physics than even I* do... Makes me
| cringe a bit to be honest.
|
| Also makes me sad when I think about all the physicists and
| engineers who have made the chips that can train multi-billion
| parameter neural networks possible. I mean the so-called "bitter
| lesson" of AI is basically "don't bet against the physicists at
| ASML et al". No prize for them?
|
| (*) I have a humble masters in engineering physics, but work in
| ML and software.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| I work in industry supporting these supply chains; our
| advancements are part of a hive mind that could be harmed if
| individuals were artificially highlighted for achievement.
|
| The academics can have their awards, we smile seeing the world
| change a bit at a time.
| bjornsing wrote:
| Nothing wrong with picking some random people out of a hive
| mind. There seems to be some notable contributions around EUV
| for example [1].
|
| And BTW, is the same not true for machine learning? I don't
| think many have even read the Boltzmann machine paper. It's
| basically a footnote in the history of deep learning. It has
| no practical significance today.
|
| 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_ultraviolet_lithog
| ra...
| lagrange77 wrote:
| I'm annoyed that he was awarded just now, obviously as a reaction
| to ChatGPT and the breakthrough of LLMs. If his work is worthy,
| it has been worthy many years ago.
|
| This reinforces the reduction of ML to LLMs, just like the use of
| the term AI.
| MeteorMarc wrote:
| Now,it is also too late for Kohonen, see
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teuvo_Kohonen
| tommysson wrote:
| How do LeCun and Bengio feel about being left out of the most
| prestigous prize of them all? (Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, and
| Yoshua Bengio was together awarded the Turing prize in 2018...)
| randcraw wrote:
| Only three can win. Do those two deserve recognition more than
| Hopfield?
| quantum_state wrote:
| Feynman would voice his objections if he were alive ... what
| about nature was discovered? ANN is an application of a variant
| of Universal Approximation Theorem ...
| saithound wrote:
| Feynman was a well-known proponent of AI and neural networks
| [1]. He even gave popular lectures on the subject [2]. He also
| claimed that replicating animal-like visual recognition
| abilities in machines would be Nobel-worthy; deep learning was
| certainoy a breakthrough in that.
|
| [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2209.00083
|
| [2] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ipRvjS7q1DI
| drpossum wrote:
| None of these arguments support giving a prize for this in
| this field for this reason. Feynman was also critical of the
| idea of the prize in general
| lyu07282 wrote:
| Yeah he only accepted his because he thought it would be
| even more of a hassle not to, but it seems like he
| seriously considered rejecting it.
| elicash wrote:
| They were responding to a specific claim someone made about
| Feynman's views. It's a good contribution to these comments
| and highly relevant.
| parodysbird wrote:
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037015731...
|
| "Jet substructure at the Large Hadron Collider: A review of
| recent advances in theory and machine learning"
| randcraw wrote:
| IMO this award recognizes the effort and success of modeling
| the acquisition of knowledge, especially toward realizing such
| models in usable ways that will surely redefine life on this
| planet forever. Few Nobels have recognized work that is so
| culturally groundbreaking (and so disruptive). It'd be hard to
| see the Nobels as a significant measure of science/technology
| if they did NOT acknowledge the revolution begat by ML using
| DL. And with Hopfield at age 91 and Hinton 76, now is the right
| time to do so.
| _visgean wrote:
| Well they should have given it to the guy who discovered the
| famous equation e=mc2 + ai..
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/LinkedInLunatics/comments/13tbfqm/w...
| firtoz wrote:
| So that means AI = 0
|
| Perfect
| randcraw wrote:
| Not AI = A?
| firtoz wrote:
| AI = A * I
| jprete wrote:
| That guy is more techbro than I can really handle.
| muratgozel wrote:
| Just watched the nobel prize live stream, surprised by the topic,
| looks very engineering to me rather than physics, do algorithms
| make physics subsidiary?
| Anon84 wrote:
| Both Hopefield Networks and Boltzmann machines trace their
| origins and motivations to Statistical Mechanics and Spin
| Glasses.
|
| Coincidently, Giorgio Parisi got the 2021 Nobel prize for his
| work on spin glasses
| adamnemecek wrote:
| It's closely related to statistical mechanics.
| aDyslecticCrow wrote:
| 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.
| andrepd wrote:
| >The most important factor tends to be the positive impact on
| society
|
| Making it even more baffling that this won then
| choilive wrote:
| If you don't think machine learning and neural networks
| have made massive positive contributions to humanity then
| you are naive.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| "Massive" seems overstated. Also doubt that it's net
| positive.
| aDyslecticCrow wrote:
| You're probably only thinking about the modern chatbots
| when you say that.
| zeofig wrote:
| Perhaps you have less idea what he's thinking than you
| think you do.
| aDyslecticCrow wrote:
| I can understand the sentiment against the current "AI"
| crace with chatbots. But are you dismissing neural networks
| as a whole as non-impactful?
|
| What about;
|
| - Improved weather forecasts
|
| - Protein folding
|
| - Medical imaging and diagnostics
|
| - Text-to-speech and voice recognition
|
| - Language Translation
|
| - Finance fraud detection
|
| - Supply chain and logistics optimization
|
| - Natural disaster prediction
| quaxi wrote:
| In the original will, invention is given the same weight as
| discovery.
|
| One could also argue that in 1895, applied computer science
| and information theory would be considered physics.
| viraj_shah wrote:
| I am really surprised. I would have guessed that a Nobel Prize
| would be awarded to advancements in the field itself. Not for
| inspirations from it or to tools that led to advancements.
| Although as I write this I'm sure there have been several
| prizes awarded to scientists / engineers who have developed
| tools to advance physics. Like radio astronomy? Still surprised
| though.
| parodysbird wrote:
| Some other recent cases of the prize being given to an
| engineering contribution:
|
| - 2018 was for chirped pulse amplification, which is most
| commonly used in medicine (LASIK surgery for example)
|
| - 2014 was for basically for LED lights
|
| - 2010 was for a method for producing graphene
|
| - 2009 was for both charge-coupled device, which is a
| component for digital imaging (including regular consumer
| digital cameras), and fibre-optic cables
| ladams wrote:
| CPA is very very widely used in experimental physics, so I
| don't really think it belongs on this list.
| parodysbird wrote:
| Well yeah, so are neural nets. I just meant that these
| are engineering accomplishments, not scientific per se.
| Of course experimental science will often take advantage
| of cutting edge technology, including from computer
| science.
| adw wrote:
| NNs have absolutely revolutionized systems biology
| (itself a John Hopfield joint, and the AlphaFold team are
| reasonably likely to get a Nobel for medicine and
| physiology, possibly as soon as 'this year') and are
| becoming relevant in all kinds of weird parts of solid-
| state physics (trained functionals for DFT, eg
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-64619-8).
|
| The idea that academic disciplines are in any way
| isolated from each other is nonsense. Machine learning is
| computer science; it's also information theory; that
| means it's thermodynamics, which means it's physics. (Or,
| rather, it can be understood properly through all of
| these lenses).
|
| John Hopfield himself has written about this; he views
| his work as physics because _it is performed from the
| viewpoint of a physicist_. Disciplines are subjective,
| not objective, phenomena.
| dekhn wrote:
| My personal theory is that Demis and John will win the
| Chemistry prize for AlphaFold this year and that they
| decided to also award this one to help bolster the idea
| that ML is making fundamental improvements in academic
| science.
|
| I would prefer if there was an actual Nobel Prize for
| Mathematics (not sure if the Fields would become that, or
| a new prize created).
| andrepd wrote:
| 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
| stainablesteel wrote:
| i reason it from the perspective that its because they've found
| a way to make a machine out of bits that no one's ever made
| before, they're physical objects
| jhbadger wrote:
| Well in 1912, the physics prize went to a guy who designed a
| better light for light houses and buoys to prevent shipwrecks!
| Actually, most early Nobels went to practical things.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustaf_Dal%C3%A9n
| chriskanan wrote:
| 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.
| whizzter wrote:
| He was probably considered since he is mentioned in the
| reasoning paper, still it could be one of those unfortunate
| omissions in the nobel history since those deciding the prize
| might have a hard time to measure impact.
| gtirloni wrote:
| Then they shouldn't be trusted to give awards in an area they
| are not experts in.
| whizzter wrote:
| That would probably leave the prizes awarded in a very
| narrow field, also the prize is supposed to be given to the
| thing that has "conferred the greatest benefit to
| humankind".
|
| So in this case they picked something that might be viewed
| as only having a tangential connection to the field, but
| the impact has been so immense that they probably went
| outside their regular comfort zone (and how many prizes can
| we give for LHC work that really don't touch regular human
| lives in the foreseeable future anyhow?).
| bjoli wrote:
| Impact is hard to quantify. There have been several
| occasions where someone who very well deserved a Nobel
| prize didn't get one. There are all kinds of reasons. Given
| he is mentioned in the reasoning he was probably
| considered. We can't know the reason he did not get the
| prize.
|
| I recently watched this quite video on the subject:
| https://youtu.be/zS7sJJB7BUI?feature=shared and found it
| quite enjoyable.
| PokemonNoGo wrote:
| Shouldn't be trusted? They are a random swedish foundation.
| How is one going to change that? Or disallow it or what you
| want.
| henrikschroder wrote:
| Trusted? The will of Alfred Nobel states that the Royal
| Swedish Academy of Sciences _is_ the body that selects the
| winner, you can 't change that.
|
| Also, I think the process looks fairly decent:
|
| https://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/physics/
|
| Gather nominations, make a shortlist, research the
| shortlist with actual field experts, present candidates,
| discuss, and vote.
|
| And in 50 years you'll be able to find out who the other
| candidates were!
| KingFelix wrote:
| Yeah, Terry is a rockstar, and pumping out tons of papers.
| Maybe they google scholared, list by citations?
| dang wrote:
| 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!
| mistercheph wrote:
| Whether or not these fields are meaningfully distinct is a
| matter of taste, despite the fashion being to imagine a
| plurality of interconnected but autonomous domains.
| hxnamer wrote:
| 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 out of their way to discourage terms
| like "synapses" and rather use "units".
| Onavo wrote:
| The deep learning variety of neural networks are heavily
| simplified, mostly linear versions of biological neurons.
| They don't resemble anything between your ears. Real life
| neurons are generally modeled by differential equations (in
| layman terms, have many levels of feedback loops tied to
| time), not the simplified ones used in dense layer activation
| functions.
|
| Here are some examples
|
| https://snntorch.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tutorials/tutorial.
| ..
| KoolKat23 wrote:
| Would that be equivalent to Weight matrice parameters?
| Onavo wrote:
| Ish, take a look at the curves of the spiking neural
| network function, they are very different from the deep
| learning nets. When we "model" biological neural nets in
| code, we are essentially coming up with a mathematical
| transfer function that can replicate the chemical
| gradient changes and electrical impulses of a real
| neuron. Imagine playing a 3D computer game like
| Minecraft, the physics is not perfect but they are "close
| enough" to the real world.
| dongecko wrote:
| Bolzman machines were there in the very early days of deep
| learning. It was a clever hack to train deep nets layer wise
| and work with limited ressources.
|
| Each layer was trained similar to the encoder part of an
| autoencoder. This way the layerwise transformations were not
| random, but roughly kept some of the original datas
| properties. Up to here training was done without the use of
| labelled data. After this training stage was done, you had a
| very nice initialization for your network and could train it
| end to end according to your task and target label.
|
| If I recall correctly, the neural layers output was
| probabilistic. Because of that you couldn't simply use back
| propagation to learn the weights. Maybe this is the
| connection to John Hopkins work. But here my memory is a bit
| fuzzy.
| etiam wrote:
| Boltzmann machines were there in the 1980s, and they were
| created on the basis of Hopfield nets (augmenting with
| statistical physics techniques, among other reasons to
| better navigate the energy landscape without getting stuck
| in local optima so much).
|
| From the people dissing the award here it seems like even a
| particularly benign internet community like HN has little
| notion of ML with ANN:s before Silicon Valley bought in for
| big money circa 2012. And media reporting from then on
| hasn't exactly helped.
|
| ANN:s go back a good deal further still (as the updated
| post does point out) but the works cited for this award
| really are foundational for the modern form in a lot of
| ways.
|
| As for DL and backpropagation: Maybe things could have been
| otherwise, but in the reality we actually got, optimizing
| deep networks with backpropagation alone never got off the
| ground on it's own. Around 2006 Hinton started getting it
| to work by building up layer-wise with optimizing
| Restricted Boltzmann Machines (the lateral connections
| within a layer are eliminated from the full Boltzmann
| Machine), resulting in what was termed a Deep Belief Net,
| which basically did it's job already but could then be
| fine-tuned with backprop for performance, once it had been
| initialized with the stack of RBM:s. An alternative
| approach with layer-wise autoencoders (also a technique
| essentially created by Hinton) soon followed.
|
| Once these approaches had shown that deep ANN:s could work
| though, the analysis showed pretty soon that the random
| weight initializations used back then (especially when
| combined with the historically popular sigmoid activation
| function) resulted in very poor scaling of the gradients
| for deep nets which all but eliminated the flow of
| feedback. It might have generally optimized eventually, but
| after way longer wait than was feasible when run on the
| computers back then. Once the problem was understood,
| people made tweaks to the weight initialization, activation
| function and otherwise the optimization, and then in many
| cases it did work going directly to optimizing with
| supervised backprop. I'm sure those tweaks are usually
| taken for granted to the point of being forgotten today,
| when one's favourite highly-optimized dedicated Deep
| Learning library will silently apply the basic ones without
| so much as being requested to, but take away the
| normalizations and the Glorot or whatever initialization
| and it could easily mean a trip back to rough times getting
| your train-from-scratch deep ANN to start showing results.
|
| I didn't expect this award, but I think it's great to see
| Hinton recognized again, and precisely because almost all
| modern coverage is to lazy to track down earlier history
| than the 2010s, not least Hopfield's foundational
| contribution, I think it is all the more important that the
| Nobel foundation did.
|
| So going back to the original question above: there are so
| many bad, confused versions of neural network history going
| around that whether or not this one is widely accepted
| isn't a good measure of quality. For what it's worth, to me
| it seems a good deal more complete and veridical than most
| encountered today.
| godelski wrote:
| > I have never heard that Hopfield nets or Bolzmann machines
| were given any major weight in the history.
|
| This is mostly because people don't realize what these are at
| more abstract levels (it's okay, ironically ML people
| frequently don't abstract). But Hopfield networks and
| Boltzmann machines have been pretty influential to the
| history of ML. I think you can draw a pretty good connection
| from Hopfield to LSTM to transformers. You can also think of
| a typical artificial neural network (easiest if you look at
| linear layers) as a special case of a Boltzmann machine
| (compare Linear Layers/Feed Forward Networks to Restricted
| Boltzmann Machines and I think it'll click).
|
| Either way, these had a lot of influence on the early work,
| which does permeate into the modern stuff. There's this
| belief that all the old stuff is useless and I just think
| that's wrong. There's a lot of hand engineered stuff that we
| don't need anymore, but a lot of the theory and underlying
| principles are still important.
| seydor wrote:
| Second time he gets overlooked (after turing award)
| adamc wrote:
| This is just weird. Can the Nobel prize committee not find
| physics it wants to celebrate?
| stroupwaffle wrote:
| I think one can consider what AI will bring to the field of
| physics. Merit is quite deserving of math and science of
| building tools which will unlock potential discoveries from
| here into the future.
|
| Despite all of the talk surrounding AI in the
| workforce/business world, I think it is actually most important
| in science.
| gauge_field wrote:
| But, this is more of a applied math than physics. There are
| many other scientist that contributed more towards
| understanding of quantum systems, e.g. Aharonov.
|
| Also, as a tool, it has not been as useful as influential as
| they make it out to be, at least less influential than the
| work Aharonov in terms of increasing our understanding
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Did Hinton win for the restricted Boltzmann machine? I believe
| Paul Smolensky has some priority with the Harmonium, but Hinton
| certainly deserves it. But worth reading Smolensky's paper, it is
| a classic!!
| https://stanford.edu/~jlmcc/papers/PDP/Volume%201/Chap6_PDP8...
| everybodyknows wrote:
| I don't see a date in the PDF. When was it written?
| ilya_m wrote:
| 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.
| gen220 wrote:
| The whole book is quite good, btw! And it looks cool on a
| bookshelf.
| dcuthbertson wrote:
| Another version of that paper [0] is dated Feb. 1986.
|
| [0]: https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA620727.pdf
| ngcc_hk wrote:
| Not really related to physics per sec, but to let physicist to
| get out of research in physics. The most self-denial award ever.
| But machine learning deserve a prize. Just this ... anyway
| congratulations
| hillsboroughman wrote:
| I wonder if they ever gave a Physics Nobel to a person who held a
| patent! People like Graham Bell never got recognized by the Nobel
| people. I get the impression that Physics Nobel prizes were more
| or less given only to University professors. They didnt seem to
| particularly care for people with grease on their hands
| tombert wrote:
| I don't really know what I'm talking about, but weren't there
| like 9 Nobel prizes awarded to Bell Labs engineers for physics?
| One of which (I think) being the invention of the transistor,
| which presumably had a patent.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| A post from yesterday, complaining about Musk not receiving a
| prize despite (according to the author of that post) deserving
| it, has had me thinking about that too. Folks like Bell, Musk,
| Bezos etc are in many ways similar to Alfred Nobel, highly
| successful and very controversial businessmen, where their
| contributions to the world have had great positives and great
| negatives.
|
| Putting aside the fact that it's also entirely reasonable to
| say that Musk, Bezos etc, while having changed the world, have
| not really personally made breakthroughs in fundamental science
| of the level as to deserve a Nobel prize; I wonder if the Nobel
| Foundation avoids figures like that because of the parallels.
| anonyfox wrote:
| Currently I'd flat out refuse to give any sort of prize to
| musk, that could be a tipping point for his mental
| "stability" completely breaking down. The last few years
| really had a toll on him. Fallen from idol to conspiracy
| rightwing idiot crashing his companies more and more.
| T-A wrote:
| "Nakamura holds 208 US utility patents as of 5 May 2020" [1]
|
| He's also a professor though, so maybe that doesn't meet your
| criteria.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuji_Nakamura
| henrikschroder wrote:
| Philipp Lenard had a patent on cathode ray tubes, Marconi on
| wireless telegraphy, Dalen had plenty of patents on the
| automatic lighthouse regulator he got the prize for, and many
| others.
|
| You can continue looking yourself:
| https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/lists/all-nobel-prizes-in-...
|
| Or maybe you can ask ChatGPT for a better summary?
| divyaranjan1905 wrote:
| Hinton has no published books on physics, and his bibliography of
| papers, to the extent I've examined, lacks any serious
| contributions to physics. There are underrepresented physicists
| who never will come close to winning a Nobel. Not to speak of the
| women in Physics, and the fact that we still have Edward Witten
| who still isn't worthy of winning a Nobel. As someone who has
| seen friends and others give up on physics due to being denied
| for funding and other institutional issues, I am infuriated at
| this gesture by the Nobel Committee.
|
| When was the last time we gave someone a Nobel physics who hasn't
| bothered writing a book? We have professors dying without a tint
| of recognition for their work. The whole ordeal is terrible, it's
| like giving Einstein a Nobel in medicine because his research on
| photoelectric effect has opened a new domain in biotechnology and
| because that's the new cool thing in the market, we'll go with
| that.
|
| A lot of the outsiders think "physics is dead", but dare they
| look into the research inside it. It is not at all dead. And
| arguing that failing to have definitive answers to the Big
| questions means being 'dead' is a terrible way to look at the
| field. Math still doesn't have a definite way to look at primes,
| for centuries we didn't have the definite way to look at
| algebraic equations of higher degrees and general solutions to
| them. That didn't make math die, that's what keeps it alive. I am
| fine with Hoppfield for once maybe, but seriously why Hinton?
| amai wrote:
| Nobody predicted that:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/1f94660/2024_nobel...
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/1fydwg3/prediction...
| Eliezer wrote:
| THAT will help. Thank you to the Nobel Prize committee for this
| choice.
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| I suppose LeCun and Bengio are way too young for a Nobel prize
| these days[0]
|
| [0] https://www.ageing.ox.ac.uk/images/fig01.jpeg
| Chabsff wrote:
| No, these are the proper laureates (for that topic anyways,
| whether the topic is appropriate in the first place is another
| matter). LeCun and Bengio's works are undoubtedly immensely
| impactful, but there's no denying that they are standing on
| shoulders of giants.
| scarmig wrote:
| Schmidhuber enters the room and has lots of things to say.
| mindcrime wrote:
| Well to be fair, everything important in AI is based on
| Jurgen's ideas!
|
| J/K'ing. That said, Jurgen has done a lot of important
| work, and may well be a bit under-appreciated.
| scarmig wrote:
| He does get a reference in the Nobel announcement, so he
| can console himself with that at least.
| mindcrime wrote:
| Good point. I suppose if one is going to not win the
| Nobel Prize, a decent "consolation prize" is at least
| being referenced in the prize announcement for whoever
| did win.
| queuebert wrote:
| That is a really strange plot. It looks like they are fitting a
| really high order polynomial to what is more or less a linear
| or maybe quadratic trend. And the overfitting exaggerates the
| recent trend.
| seydor wrote:
| It will certainly be an interesting acceptance speech by Hinton
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| What if I were to tell you that Physics included more than
| Theoretical Particles?
|
| Are experimental Physicist just Engineers?
|
| Are String Theorists just Mathematicians?
|
| Is John von Neumann not a Physicist because he also worked with
| Computers?
|
| Awful lot of nit-picking in this thread.
| rramadass wrote:
| No; The Nobel Committee has done a complete error in judgement
| with this.
|
| These are Mathematics/CS techniques and nothing whatever to do
| with _core Theoretical /Experimental Physics_ notwithstanding
| that they may have been inspired from Physics. There are plenty
| of Physics Researchers toiling away at real hard problems of
| the Physical World and instead of recognizing them the
| Committee has gone with "market fads" which themselves were
| only realizable due to Hardware advances at scale over the past
| decade. With this award they have disheartened and demotivated
| all _true_ Physics Researchers which is a huge disservice to
| the Hard Science Community.
|
| This is not to say that AI/ML researchers/community are not
| worthy of recognition. But they should not be folded under
| Physics rather a new category should have been created and they
| then awarded under it.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| I think there has now been enough crossover between
| Information Theory and Quantum Mechanics, that we can stop
| splitting hairs between "it's an algorithm on a computer,
| that isn't physics".
| blululu wrote:
| Physics is pretty old and it has always been about
| understanding the fundamental structure of reality. If it
| doesn't tell you how it all goes round then it is not physics:
| plain and simple.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Do physicists know the fundamental structure? They have some
| mathematical approximations that work for some measurements.
| They can make some predictions in some areas, but the same
| approximations break down in other areas. So the fundamentals
| aren't 'known'.
|
| Some think measurements is engineering. So are the physicist
| that focus on building an apparatus to measure a theory, they
| are engineers? So only the theoretical people doing math are
| physicist? Even thought at that point they are only doing
| math?
|
| Is Information Theory and Entropy a Computer Science subject
| or a Physics subject?
| blululu wrote:
| Physicists have learned quite a bit about the fundamental
| structure of the cosmos in the last 500 years. We can get
| into philosophical quibbles over what is knowledge and the
| relationship between approximations to reality, but we have
| clearly developed a very rich understanding of how the
| world works. A lot of the fundamentals are very clearly
| known. Entropy and statistical mechanics have been part of
| physics for 150 years and have clearly enhanced our
| understanding of the universe. Claude Shannon's work
| definitively helped us understand the world more deeply. I
| think deep learning is interesting but it would be a
| stretch to claim that this has enriched our understanding
| of the universe by a large margin. Definitely not as much
| as Shannon's work.
| slashdave wrote:
| > Are String Theorists just Mathematicians?
|
| Umm... well
| molli wrote:
| Hinton: Studied psychology, became cognitive scientist.
|
| Schmidhuber: Studied cs and math, developed algorithmic theory of
| the computable universe.
|
| Hinton wins Nobel price in physics.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Was just listening to a live radio interview with Hinton finding
| him in a small hotel room in California somewhere quite
| flabbergasted at the news. Interviewer all happy for him etc, but
| when delving more into what it was for he started to go off on AI
| concerns etc and the interview didn't last much longer.
|
| Acceptance speech might be something.
| scarmig wrote:
| Hoping he speaks a lot of truth to power.
| an_cap wrote:
| An excellent career retrospective by John Hopfield -
| https://pni.princeton.edu/sites/g/files/toruqf321/files/docu...
|
| "As an Academy member I could publish such a paper without any
| review (this is no longer true, a sad commentary on aspects of
| science publishing and the promotion of originality)."
| DrillShopper wrote:
| Yeah, fuck peer review!/s
| ajkjk wrote:
| Everyone's first thought when they read something is whatever
| the social norms say you're supposed to think (peer review =
| good, publishing without peer review = not science somehow?),
| but shouldn't you stop and wonder why the esteemed scientist
| wrote that line instead of just dismissing it? Otherwise you
| are only chiming in to enforce a norm that everyone already
| knows about, which is pointless.
|
| One of the really refreshing things about reading older
| research is how there used to be all these papers which are
| just stray thoughts that this or that scientist had,
| sometimes just a few paragraphs of response to some other
| paper, or a random mathematical observation that might mean
| nothing. It feels very healthy. Of course there were far
| fewer scientists then; if this was allowed today it might be
| just too crowded to be useful; back then everyone mostly knew
| about everyone else and it was more based on reputation. But
| dang it must have been in a nice to have such an unrestricted
| flow of ideas.
|
| Today the notion of a paper is that it is at least ostensibly
| "correct" and able to be used as a source of truth: cited in
| other papers, maybe referred to in policy or legal settings,
| etc. But it seems like this wasn't always the case, at least
| in physics and math which are the fields I've spent a lot of
| time on. From reading old papers you get the impression that
| they really used to be more about just sharing ideas, and
| that people wouldn't publish a bad paper because it would be
| embarrassing to do so, rather than because it was double- and
| triple-checked by reviewers.
| erinnh wrote:
| Im not a scientist and do not know how these things work
| out, but wouldn't it be possible for scientist to simply
| publish their papers online without peer review if that is
| what they want?
|
| What's stopping them from doing so?
| auggierose wrote:
| Their survival instinct.
| naasking wrote:
| The only for work to have an impact is if it gets
| exposure. Publishing in journals got you an audience, but
| that audience is gatekept by peer review, which has its
| problems.
|
| So sure, you could publish but the chance of having an
| impact was low. Thankfully that's changed a bit with
| arxiv.
| MichaelDickens wrote:
| Nothing stops them, some people do do that. Two examples
| that come to mind are Aella's research on fetishes[1] and
| Scott Alexander's research on birth order effects[2]. But
| you don't get academic credibility by publishing online
| without peer review, and it's much harder to get
| university funding.
|
| [1] https://aella.substack.com/p/fetish-tabooness-vs-
| popularity
|
| [2] https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/08/fight-me-
| psychologists...
| ars wrote:
| That still exists, they just call them pre-prints and put
| them on the arxiv.
| ajkjk wrote:
| Very true and it's wonderful. But only a thing in some
| fields, as I understand it. In the past that was the role
| that a lot of papers played but the conflation of
| publications and citations with career advancement messes
| that all up.
| tikhonj wrote:
| We still have lots of stray thoughts, responses and
| observations, now they just happen on blog posts, on social
| media and in other non-peer-reviewed venues. The Internet
| has driven the cost of publishing to 0, and peer review is
| the only thing left that makes academic publishing
| qualitatively different. If anything, publishing your
| thoughts online is better than publishing a traditional
| paper in every single way _except_ for peer review.
| ajkjk wrote:
| Well, publishing online also has a reach problem. The
| nice thing about journals is that they consolidate all
| the material on a subject. Arxiv does this for some
| fields (and I guess similar aggregators in other fields)
| but really it is nice to have the thoughts still be
| _curated_, like a magazine, without necessarily being to
| a citeable/publishable standard.
| naasking wrote:
| Yes, but non-sarcastically.
| kkylin wrote:
| National Academy members still get to pick the reviewers (if
| they choose to go that route rather than regular submisssion),
| and the review is not blind. The reviews themselves are not
| public, but the identities of the reviewers are made public
| once the paper is out. So members can't just say whatever sh*t
| they want (and you can imagine some do), but still a highly
| unusual process.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| Has there ever been a Nobel Prize whose basis is more threatening
| to HN core constituency?
| andrenth wrote:
| I guess if it's not metaphysics then it's physics.
| timonoko wrote:
| Why is that? I have video of Teuvo Kohonen explaining neural
| networks in 1985. "You can stack them" and "when a network has
| learned a skill, you can sell it as separate entity". What more
| you want?
|
| https://youtu.be/Qy3h7kT3P5I?si=3Klgib0TaTbiG6dC&t=2477
| ecosystem wrote:
| Hopfield associate NNs was several years prior to 1985.
| ecosystem wrote:
| Hopfield made substantial contributions (Nobel-contention work)
| in multiple fields, which is truly astonishing: Kinetic
| proofreading (biochemistry/biophysics), HopNets (ML), long
| distance electron transfer (physics), and much more.
|
| Welcome news that he finally got there.
| cwiz wrote:
| It seems physics is natural continuation for those who want
| understand what's behind the curtains after all. Thanks
| physicists for providing support for AI scientists. Next phase
| for joint research is quantum AI where one would need expertise
| in both physics and ML.
| T-A wrote:
| Old news:
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/nature23474
| nextos wrote:
| I find the prize a bit odd this time since it focused on Hopfield
| networks and Boltzmann machines. Picking those two architectures
| in particular seems a bit arbitrary. Besides, Parisi got the
| prize last year (edit: actually 2021, time flies) for spin
| glasses. Hopfield networks are quite related. They could have
| included Hopfield & Hinton too, and it would have looked more
| coherent.
|
| It is also concerning that lately the Nobel Committee seems to be
| ignoring fundamental broad theoretical contributions. In this
| case, backpropagation, where Seppo Linnainmaa could have been one
| of the awardees. It is a bit sad he and others who have already
| passed away get little credit for something so fundamental.
| whatshisface wrote:
| The Nobel in Physics only goes with experimental discoveries,
| Peter Higgs didn't get his (deserved since the 70s) until the
| LHC directly observed the particle.
|
| I agree that Hopfield networks and Boltzmann machines are a
| surprisingly arbitrary choices. It is like they wanted to give
| a prize to someone for neural networks, but had to pick people
| from inside their own field to represent the development, which
| limited the range of options. There is also the aspect of the
| physics community wanting to give somebody that they liked a
| Nobel, and then trying to fit them in. (The prize isn't handed
| out by a shadowy committee of Swedes, there's an involved and
| highly bureaucratic process for nomination that requires your
| colleagues to take up your case.)
| nextos wrote:
| But, as you said, Higgs got his prize once theories were
| tested. Hence, theoretical contributors (still alive as per
| prize rules) could have been included here as well.
| dawnofdusk wrote:
| Giorgio Parisi's prize proves the committee gives prizes for
| theoretical discoveries nowadays. This year's prize is more
| proof.
| pfortuny wrote:
| Mmmmhhhhh... What about Penrose? Honest question.
| graemep wrote:
| Nor did Georges Lemaitre, nor other theorists, and in that
| case the experimental physicists who (accidentally!)
| discovered the evidence did win Nobels.
| spullara wrote:
| I've never heard that it had to be tied to experimental
| discoveries. For example, Feynman got the prize for Feynman
| diagrams, path integrals and QED calculations. None of that
| directly tied to experimental work.
|
| It has definitely been awarded for both theoretical and
| experimental contributions throughout its history. Many
| theoretical physicists have received the prize for their
| conceptual breakthroughs, even without direct experimental
| verification at the time.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Interesting. Those are essentially inventions, not
| discoveries?
| dekhn wrote:
| That was the reasoning given when Einstein won his prize
| for the photoelectric effect, not relativity (although the
| reasons were actually fairly complicated:
| https://www.advancedsciencenews.com/the-dramatic-story-
| behin...)
| wing_rets wrote:
| Parisi won in 2021, not last year. His work was more about
| establishing spin glasses as a way to study complex systems.
| Hopfield definitely built on that, showing how those ideas
| could be applied to neural networks and info storage in state-
| space machines.
|
| As for focusing on Hopfield networks and Boltzmann machines, I
| get where you're coming from. They're just a couple of
| architectures among many, but they're pretty foundational.
| They're deeply rooted in statistical mechanics and have had a
| huge impact, finding applications across a range of fields
| beyond just machine learning.
| nextos wrote:
| Thanks, that's right, 2021 not 2023. Corrected.
| adw wrote:
| > Hopfield networks and Boltzmann machines
|
| Think of this as a Nobel prize for systems physics -
| essentially "creative application of statistical mechanics" -
| and it makes a lot more sense why you'd pick these two.
|
| (I am a mineral physicist who now works in machine learning,
| and I absolutely think of the entire field as applied
| statistical mechanics; is that correct? Yes and no: it's a
| valid metaphor.)
| alephnerd wrote:
| You ain't wrong.
|
| Lots of ML is heavily influenced by fundamental research done
| by Physicists (eg. Boltzmann Machines), Linguists (eg.
| Optimality Theory / Paul Smolensky, Phylogenetic Trees/Stuart
| Russell+Tandy Warnow), Computational Biologists (eg.
| Phylogenetic Trees/Stuart Russell+Tandy Warnow), Electrical
| Engineers (eg. Claude Shannon), etc.
|
| ML (and CS in general) is very interdisciplinary, and it
| annoys me that a lot of SWEs think they know more than other
| fields.
| avip3d wrote:
| Why does it fall under physics and not under mathematics?
| uoaei wrote:
| There is no Nobel Prize in Mathematics.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| the Nobel Prize doesn't do mathematics.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Further: the "Nobel equivalent" maths prize is the Fields
| Medal:
|
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fields_Medal>
| lucasban wrote:
| There isn't a Nobel prize for mathematics. There is the Fields
| medal but it is different, and not handled by the same
| organization.
| gweinberg wrote:
| True, but that's not a very good reason for giving a Nobel
| Prize in Physics to something that isn't physics. I think the
| standard way of giving a Nobel Prize to mathematicians is to
| call it economics.
| dev1ycan wrote:
| You can't take this back, this literally just discredited the
| only nobel that actually mattered, great job discrediting the
| nobel.
| uoaei wrote:
| This is an appropriate application of this prize considering
| the adage that there are now three pillars to science, the
| third being simulation (after theory and experiment).
|
| Also, many of the underlying theories in machine learning
| display deep analogy with physical laws we are already familiar
| with, e.g., thermodynamics.
|
| Machine learning is much bigger than chatbots.
| OneDonOne wrote:
| What Nobel-worthy physical, chemical, or biological process
| has been solved/discovered in silico?
| moralestapia wrote:
| Hey!
|
| >the adage that there are now three pillars to science, the
| third being simulation (after theory and experiment)
|
| Any specific place I could learn more about this? (aside from
| Google obv.)
|
| I do simulation for a living, so that is mega-interesting to
| me.
| uoaei wrote:
| I heard it from a professor who was a researcher in
| magnetohydrodynamics, studying flows on and under the
| surface of the sun. I don't know where to read more
| unfortunately, I'm not sure where it'sbeen fleshed out as
| an ideology.
| gandalfgreybeer wrote:
| Two of my research advisers whose dissertations in PhD Physics
| had Hopfield as their primary reference. I'm also a PhD
| candidate working on one right now (no longer my primary
| reference because of all the developments) but I can trace
| several of my main references back to them.
| OneDonOne wrote:
| What do computer programs have to do with physics?
| hildolfr wrote:
| I get the hoopla about why this shouldn't be in physics, but to
| answer your question: everything.
|
| We like to act like it's a new abstraction entirely, but
| everything about code is predicated on physics and earlier
| associated works.
| nilkn wrote:
| This must be frustrating to see for all the actual physicists out
| there. What work in physics got ignored so that a prize for AI
| could be shoehorned in?
|
| I do think work on neural networks does rise to the level of a
| Nobel Prize. So I don't have any problem with this work getting
| such high-level recognition. But I really struggle with the
| physics classification and the side effect of omitting an award
| to physicists this cycle.
| siva7 wrote:
| Well, was there anything in physics more important than AI? No?
| See...
| xvedejas wrote:
| It just makes one wonder, what is the point of categories of
| Nobel prizes? Should they instead hand out half a dozen or so
| prizes each year for whatever is most important to them?
| whatshisface wrote:
| The categories correspond to who's filling out the
| nomination paperwork, and voting. You might think of it as
| a "Nobel from physics," which only usually is a Nobel in
| physics.
| pknomad wrote:
| No deeper point other than the person who funded it thought
| these fields should be awarded and encouraged (econ is the
| exception).
| pknomad wrote:
| I was scratching my head but then it seems like the precedence
| for awarding Nobel prize for Physics for something that isn't
| "exclusively" physics has been set before.
|
| https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2018/summary/
|
| Peter Shor also got an award (albeit non Nobel) for something
| that overlaps Physics with Math + CS.
|
| https://news.mit.edu/2022/shor-spielman-breakthrough-prize-0...
|
| To me, I'd rather see a Nobel Prize in Math/CS/IS but if I had
| to choose where these type of work would be shoehorned into
| existing Nobel prize category physics would be it.
| ecosystem wrote:
| That could be true for half the prize, but for the other half,
| Hopfield is part of undergraduate and graduate physics canon.
| GaggiX wrote:
| Many of the actual physicists out there are ML researchers.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| The distinctions between experimental-theoretical scientific
| disciplines are fairly arbitrary, e.g. where does one draw the
| line between physics and chemistry and biology? Mathematics is
| something of an exception but there's no Nobel for that, nor
| for astronomy, planetary science, etc.
|
| The Nobels are grossly overrated and the idea that one can
| follow the most important scientific developments of the past
| century by just listing off the Nobel Prizes since 1905 is one
| best abandoned.
| xcodevn wrote:
| Looking forward to Hinton receiving a Fields Medal for
| _inventing_ backpropagation.
| aithrowawaycomm wrote:
| This is sarcastic, right?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seppo_Linnainmaa
| xanderlewis wrote:
| Is this a joke?
| Izikiel43 wrote:
| Weird, this is what the Turing award is for
| crmd wrote:
| I strongly suspect consciousness will be the next great paradigm
| in physics, following electrodynamics, quantum mechanics, and
| general relativity, now that the 'detour' of string theory is
| mostly behind us. Some, like Penrose, are already thinking about
| it but too late in their careers to make any breakthroughs.
|
| Machine learning research is the logical entry point as the
| 'particle physics' of cognition and consciousness.
|
| I think in retrospect we will say it was obvious why so many
| physics PhDs were working on ML during this era.
| jhbadger wrote:
| Of course there's another reason why physics PhDs are working
| on ML these days -- it's also the same reason so many of them
| are Wall Street quants.
| dudu24 wrote:
| I am a physicist working in ML and this is an absolutely
| bonkers comment lol
| NalNezumi wrote:
| This feels.... Weird, It feels like Turing award exist for a
| reason and Hinton getting Nobel prise in physics is a stretch,
| unless you claim his contribution extend to things such as
| development of Alphafold.
|
| In any case, I'm anticipating a long blog post from Schmidhuber
| about this soon.
| sharadov wrote:
| Wouldn't ML and NN fall under the field of mathematics than
| physics?
| pknerd wrote:
| eh..is it some kind of hallucination by "NobelGPT"?
| kdavis wrote:
| As someone who has done lots of work in both fields, this is some
| BS.
| WhitneyLand wrote:
| "In 1985 Hinton published a paper 'How I Intend to Screw Over
| Physicists by Winning Their Nobel Prize'"
|
| As expected iconoclast Sabine Hossenfelder is quick out of the
| gate with sarcasm and commentary on this one.
|
| https://youtu.be/dR1ncz-Lozc?si=7kpntqwCzp0HLi02
| bijant wrote:
| thank you for wasting 2 minutes of my time as I obviously
| looked for the paper in parallel to listening to the video XD
| sidcool wrote:
| Can someone ELI5 what they did?
| jmakov wrote:
| Wonder when Anna will get her share since she's making all this
| possible by making the articles and books available (Anna's
| archive).
| mppm wrote:
| It will be awarded jointly to Anna and Alexandra. "For
| incalculable contributions to all sciences".
| chubot wrote:
| I definitely think their work is deserving of awards, but I kinda
| agree with other commenters in that this says more about the
| Nobel committee than anything
|
| i.e. Hinton has already won a Turing Award in 2018, and there is
| no Nobel for computer science
|
| And this work was already recognized to have impact ~12 years
| ago, when he auctioned his company of 2 grad students to
| Google/Microsoft/Baidu/Facebook, for over $40M, ultimately going
| with Google [1]
|
| ---
|
| i.e. IMO it feels a little late / weird / irrelevant to be giving
| this award in physics to machine learning research - it doesn't
| feel like that would have happened without the news cycle
|
| At least IMO the scientific awards are more interesting when
| they're leading indicators, not trailing ones -- when they are
| given by peers, acknowledging impact that may happen in the
| future.
|
| Because it often takes decades to have impact, and it may occur
| after the researcher has passed away
|
| ---
|
| [1] https://www.amazon.com/Genius-Makers-Mavericks-Brought-
| Faceb... - good book if you're interested in how technology
| transfer happened in the last 10-15 years
| whatshisface wrote:
| > _IMO it feels a little late / weird / irrelevant_
|
| > _scientific awards are more interesting when leading
| indicators_
|
| Peter Higgs waited 50 years, the Nobel is not a "leading
| indicator." If it was, it would be given out on the basis of
| the "hype cycle," which would not be very helpful to anybody.
| chubot wrote:
| Well, it's possible to wait 50 years, and still NOT have
| realized the full impact of your work in society
|
| Sometimes science/engineering turns out like that
|
| e.g. I think Claude Shannon is like that -- his impact
| continues to rise, and he's viewed as more important after he
| died
|
| He apparently never won a Turing Award or Nobel Prize,
| probably because there was and is no Nobel in computer
| science
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Shannon#Awards_and_hono.
| ..
|
| So I guess I mean "drawing attention to something that would
| have not otherwise had attention", and based on the consensus
| of people working in the field
| meepmorp wrote:
| The Higgs boson was first detected in 2012 and he won the
| Nobel the following year. Saying he waited 50 years for the
| prize is a bit disingenuous.
| kibwen wrote:
| It's not disingenuous, the Higgs mechanism was theorized in
| the 60s:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_for_the_Higgs_boson
| martopix wrote:
| Not the poster, but I don't understand the downvotes: this
| is exactly right. Higgs was awarded the Nobel after the
| mechanism he theorized was experimentally confirmed, and
| that is 100% the reason it took so long.
| meepmorp wrote:
| Right! Einstein didn't get the Nobel because the theory
| of relativity is awesome, he got it after Eddington
| observed gravitational lensing during an eclipse,
| confirming a key prediction.
|
| Brilliant theorizing can be both brilliant and wrong.
| kragen wrote:
| Einstein got the Nobel Prize for his work on quantum
| physics, not relativity.
| hintymad wrote:
| Has NN led to any fundamental breakthrough in physics research? I
| understand the impact from NN to scientific research, but I'm not
| aware of any big results in fundamental physics research because
| of NN.
| colmmacc wrote:
| It's not the Nobel Prize in Fundamental Physics though, and
| maybe this is correcting a bias that has been present for too
| long. Just because something isn't quantum or astronomical
| doesn't mean it's not physics.
|
| Physics is the study of the physical world, and learning,
| imagination, creativity, are all phenomena that we observe in
| the physical world but have only a primitive understanding of.
| It's a staggering advancement that we can now simulate key
| aspects of each.
| etiam wrote:
| It seems like part of the motivation here is that it's possible
| to run many contemporary and planned very-big-science projects
| at all, since nobody's going to be sitting around analyzing
| centuries' worth of unvetted sensor data, but there are plenty
| of people prepared to spend a few years of their lives checking
| and massaging the regions of interest marked by a computer
| cluster.
|
| The simplest cases will have been long enabled by simpler
| regressions and such, of course, but the more complex pattern
| recognition appears to be appreciated.
| mikaeluman wrote:
| I think this says more about the state of modern physics than
| anything else. Sad.
| chx wrote:
| I posted https://hachyderm.io/@chx/113272153511607297
|
| > So they gave the Nobel Physics prize to AI bros before honoring
| another woman. Five women were ever honored so and 221 men.
|
| > This is your regular reminder Wikipedia refused an attempt to
| create a page for Donna Strickland with "This submission's
| references do not show that the subject qualifies for a Wikipedia
| article" not half a year before she became a Nobel laureate.
| Katalin Kariko's page was not created until April 27, 2020.
|
| #EverydaySexism #SystemicMisogyny
|
| It got a decent amount of favs and retoots - and no angry
| responses. Now, when I posted this here, it got flagged.
|
| That tells a hell lot about the people who visit the site. It's a
| great opportunity to check your own biases. That's why I am
| reposting it with this note.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Consider the Nobel in economics:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Econom...
|
| It was not one of the original five, but it was endowed by a
| bank.
|
| SO: you tech billionaires, why don't _you_ endow a Prize in
| Computer Science? That would end the dispute about whether ML is
| "really" physics?
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| Isn't backpropagation to train NNs the big innovation in this
| space? Neither of these guys invented that.
| fsndz wrote:
| I think they look at the overall impact not just one single
| thing. a lot of people invented backpropagation independently
| but after that their impact was low. Hinton is like everywhere
| when you look at the state of machine learning now
| infinite8s wrote:
| Hinton is only one of two people in history to win both the Nobel
| and the Turing award (Herbert Simon is the other, although he won
| the economics Nobel).
| zulban wrote:
| Tinfoil hat: this is a scheme to stir up enough trouble that a
| Nobel prize for computer science is created.
| rkp8000 wrote:
| Here is a link to the press conference with Hopfield at Princeton
| University: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk3Ok1D1xR8
| zeofig wrote:
| Looks like the Nobel wants to fast track its march towards
| irrelevancy. What a joke.
|
| I see a lot of people saying "physics has stalled" etc., which is
| not the case. It may be the case for high energy physics (I would
| not even make that statement myself with any confidence), but
| there is a lot of other physics being done.
| mindcrime wrote:
| Congratulations to Doctors Hopfield and Hinton! It's wonderful to
| see them both receiving such an esteemed prize, in recognition of
| the outstanding work they have both done.
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