The week of the Nobel Prizes is in full swing! The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics, the second in the series of prestigious awards, was announced on Tuesday, October 8
This year, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for “fundamental discoveries and inventions enabling machine learning with artificial neural networks”, a subset of Artificial Intelligence.
The two Nobel laureates in physics used tools from physics to develop methods that lay the foundation for modern-day machine learning. John Hopfield created an associative memory system that can store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns in data. Geoffrey Hinton, also called the “Godfather of Artificial Intelligence”, invented a method that can autonomously find properties in data, and thus can perform tasks such as identifying certain elements in images, according to a press release from .
“The work of the laureates has already brought the greatest benefit”
When we talk about , we often mean machine learning with the help of artificial neural networks. This technology was originally inspired by the structure of the brain. In an artificial neural network, brain neurons are representatives of nodes that have various values. These nodes influence each other through connections that can be likened to synapses and that can be stronger or weaker.
The network is trained, for example, by developing stronger links between nodes with high values. The laureates of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics have conducted important research with artificial neural networks since the 1980s, Nobel Committee members said.
“The work of the laureates has already brought the greatest benefit. In physics, we use artificial in several areas, such as the development of new materials with specific properties,” said Ellen Moons, director of the Nobel Committee for Physics.
One of the Nobel laureates for Physics, “stunned” by the announcement
One of the two laureates, Geoffrey Hinton, spoke at the press conference where the Nobel Prize in Physics was announced and told reporters he was “stunned” by the announcement.
Hinton also stated that the advance in artificial neural networks will be comparable to the Industrial Revolution, but that at the same time we must be careful that they “do not get out of control”.
“Whenever I want to know an answer to something, I ask him. I don’t have complete confidence, but it is useful”, said the Nobel laureate, when asked by a journalist if he has any favorite Artificial Intelligence program.
The day before, the first in a series of prizes, for medicine, was won by two scientists who discovered “a fundamental principle governing the regulation of gene activity”. in Physiology or Medicine, was awarded for “the discovery of microRNA and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation”.
