The Nobel Prize in physics goes to Geoffrey Hinton for his work in computer science. What?
The Nobel Prize in physics goes to Geoffrey Hinton for his work in computer science. What?
Computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton and physicist John Hopfield have won a Nobel Prize for their pioneering work on the neural network architecture that underlies machine learning. Specifically, the…
Sneers from r/physics! First up, this comment by napqe:
I'm sorry, but this is like awarding the nobel prize for literature to Xerox/HP/Brother for "improvements to printing".
And in the same thread, from GustapheOfficial:
Last year's prize was too relevant, they had to stagger the physics by a year.
We also have this by M1st_:
What's next? Someone gets a Nobel prize for another algorithm that numerically solves differential equations??
Finally, we've the title of this thread, by TheSkells:
Yeah, "physics"
38So Geoffrey Hinton is a total dork.
Hopefully, [this Nobel Prize] will make me more credible when I say these things really do understand what they're saying. [There] is a whole school of linguistics that comes from Chomsky that thinks it's nonsense to say these things understand language. That school is wrong. Neural nets are much better at processing language than anything produced by the Chomsky school of linguistics.
36Neural nets are much better at processing language than anything produced by the Chomsky school of linguistics.
Hey mate, did you get your PhD or a fucking Nobel in linguistics by any chance? No? Just talking about shit you apparently have no idea about?
I didn't even know you could be a crank about linguistics, that's pretty amazing. What other otherwise really boring fields are you going to tackle, geodesy?
31there's plenty of linguistics cranks, but most of them have nationalistic tint, like people thinking that all languages come from turkish or something like that
27Hey mate, did you get your PhD or a fucking Nobel in linguistics by any chance?
Early onset Nobel disease.
21I'm just waiting for him to chime in about music theory.
14
efficient move, getting the Nobel disease in before the Nobel itself
27
nobel committee went full on ai-brained this year, nobel prize in chemistry is for alphafold. they had three good years in a row, had to do something stupid ig
36lol that's gonna age like milk
13still better than peace prize for kissinger
23i mean they still can give nobel prize in literature to chatgpt for extruding most text in unit of time
this is not my field, but allegedly alphafold kinda works, but it's also not ai and more pattern matching, something that google does expertly. i still don't think that it's gonna be very useful even that it does solve a hard problem
14
half goes to david baker, you might remember him from rosetta@home thing. the other two people are from google deepmind
i guess it's one of these years when chemistry nobel goes to biologists, but now with layer of ai hype on top for some weird fucking reason
10
Given how much money is being
wastedinvested in AI, they should have given them the Economics prize.28There is no Economics Nobel prize right?
2
Repeating a comment I made in another forum here...
The Nobel organization is basically all about PR, and while as the nominating body they’re nominally independent, the Royal Academy of Science knows on which side their bread is buttered. Having a prize adjacent to AI in the year of our LLM 2024 is a no-brainer.
25Having a prize adjacent to AI in the year of our LLM 2024 is a no-brainer.
This works on multiple levels
17
ah yes, the dynamite guy award show, a fine institution of the ages
22The "everything is physics" crowd is awfully silent right now 🤔
20Lucky 10000: this integration started decades ago. You may have heard of "computational trinitarianism" or read Baez & Stay 2009. The current big listing of correspondences is called the computational trilogy. Don't let the Nobel committee's foolishness blind you to the genuine connections between computer science and physics.
5
Hinton could be the first guy to win a Nobel and an Ignobel in the same year.
17AI is poisoning science development. It is not necessary that everything uses AI ffs!!
17Using tools from physics to create something that is popular but unrelated to physics is enough for the nobel prize in physics?
So, if say a physicist creates a new recipe for the world's greatest potato casserole, and it becomes popular everywhere, and they used some physics for creating the recipe to calculate the best heat distribution or whatever, then that's enough?
14Using tools from physics to create something that is popular but unrelated to physics is enough for the nobel prize in physics?
If only, it's not even that! Neither Boltzmann machines nor Hopfield networks led to anything used in the modern spam and deepfake generating AI, nor in image recognition AI, or the like. This is the kind of stuff that struggles to get above 60% accuracy on MNIST (hand written digits).
Hinton went on to do some different stuff based on backpropagation and gradient descent, on newer computers than those who came up with it long before him, and so he got Turing Award for that, and it's a wee bit controversial because of the whole "people doing it before, but on worse computers, and so they didn't get any award" thing, but at least it is for work that is on the path leading to modern AI and not for work that is part of the vast list of things that just didn't work and it's extremely hard to explain why you would even think they would work in the first place.
3if there's a massive potato casserole bubble
12@dgerard @nightsky when we getting pivot-to-massive-potato-casserole.com
3
Maybe if the potato casserole is exploded in the microwave by another physicist, on his way to start a resonance cascade...
(i'll see myself out).
7
it's happening omg. check back in five years
14From your linked post:
also from their pov the statistical approach to machine learning was defined by abandoning the attempt to externalize the meaning of text. the cliche they used to refer to this was “the meaning of a word is the context in which it occurs.”
Not an expert by any means, but this sounds like pagerank, but for language.
11there's a similarity in the sense that they're both 'content free.' pagerank didn't care about what was on your site, only what your page linked to and what pages linked to you
(past tense bc it's unclear to me whether Google even uses pagerank at this point)
they diverge pretty significantly in one way: pagerank is an algorithm motivated by pragmatic simplifications. discarding the information of content when ranking sites is only something you would do because using content is really hard. you can take the statistical approach to semantics in the same spirit, but you don't have to... ai true believers are necessarily treating the maxim I referred to as a philosophical claim, something that addresses the ground truth of what words are
10To me it sounds like post-modernism.
8
I understood some of those words
4
Also discussed in the Stubsack.
12Hopfield is enormously influential, I don't mind him getting a major prize at all. Physics seems weird tho.
9Yada yada Chinese room
7Nobel prize in Physics for attempting to use physics in AI but it didn't really work very well and then one of the guys working on a better more pure mathematics approach that actually worked and got the Turing Award for the latter, but that's not what the prize is for, while the other guy did some other work, but that is not what the prize is for. AI will solve all physics!!!111
7The Nobel Prize committee really seem to be trying hard to make this the worst set of awardees ever, aren't they? All we need is another Kissinger-esque situation for the Peace Prize and a Handke-esque situation for the Literature prize and they'll have disgraced the Nobel Prizes permanently.
7Netanyahu for the peace prize, is Vance for literature.
8I was going to suggest Vitalik Buterin for the Fake Nobel of Economics as a bit, but the coiners already beat me to it.
So my next choices for the award would be SBF or Bored Ape Yacht Club.
5Then next year Hopfield and Hinton go back to Sweden, don't tell king of Sweden anything, king of Sweden still gives them the Nobel Prize! King of Sweden now has conditioned reflex!
3
Out of curiosity, are they using any of his underlying ML techniques to analyze imaging/other data collection before using it in actual physics models?
6Well, just about every data analysis technique ever invented has been applied in physics somewhere. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on applying a genetic algorithm to electron-atom scattering in particle detectors, a topic which I recall someone had already tried neural networks on.
10That's what I'm wondering. It's not wild to give him a prize in physics if his techniques led to advancement in physics.
"CS is applied math, not applied physics" like physics isn't just applied math to model real world data is kind of weird, especially if his particular math actually got used in physics. That's pretty much what calculus was.
6