John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton won the Nobel Prize in physics for helping create the building blocks of machine learning that is revolutionising the way we work and live. But it also creates new threats to humanity, one of the winners said.
Hopfield’s and Hinton’s work began in the 1980s, setting the stage for the current boom in artificial intelligence that was enabled by an explosion of computing power and massive troves of training data. Hopfield created an associative memory that can store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns in data, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said. Hinton’s contribution was inventing a method that can autonomously find properties in data, and so perform tasks such as identifying specific elements in pictures.
“I’m flabbergasted, I had no idea this would happen. I am very surprised,” Hinton, 76, told journalists gathered in Stockholm by phone. Hinton, who was born in London, is affiliated with the University of Toronto in Canada, while Chicago-born Hopfield, 91, is associated with Princeton University.
Among the most famous physics laureates include Albert Einstein in 1921 for services to theoretical physics and Marie Curie, together with her husband Pierre, for research on radiation in 1903.
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Ellen Moons, a member of the Nobel committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said the two laureates “used fundamental concepts from statistical physics to design artificial neural networks that function as associative memories and find patterns in large data sets”.
She said that such networks have been used to advance physics research and “have also become part of our daily lives, for instance in facial recognition and language translation”.
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Six days of Nobel prize announcements began on October 7 with US-based Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun winning the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of tiny bits of genetic material that serve as on-and-off switches inside cells that help control what the cells do and when they do it. If scientists can better understand how they work and how to manipulate them, it could one day lead to powerful treatments for diseases like cancer.
The physics prize carries a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor from a bequest left by the award’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. The laureates are invited to receive their awards at ceremonies on December 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.
With inputs from Agencies
