Two North American-based academics used physics to help pioneer advances in AI — and now they're being rewarded for their contribution with the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences DESIGNATED on Tuesday, Princeton Professor Emeritus John Hopfield and University of Toronto Professor Geoffrey E. Hinton were the latest winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics. Hopfield was honored for inventing THE Hopfield Neural Networka system that stores and recreates patterns in data, in 1982.
Hinton, who has been called “Godfather of AI” used the Hopfield network as the basis for a network of his own, the Boltzmann machine, which he co-invented in 1985. The machine can identify properties in data and be used for tasks such as finding hidden features in data.
“The Boltzmann machine can be used to classify images or create new examples of the type of model it was trained on,” the Nobel Prize committee. said in a post on X. “Hinton has built on this work, helping to usher in the current explosive development of machine learning.”
Prize winners share a prize of 11 million Swedish kronor or 1.06 million US dollars.
Chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics Ellen Moons, Secretary General of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Hans Ellegren and Member of the Nobel Committee for Physics Anders Irbaeck announce the two winners of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics, shown on screen. Photo by JONATHAN NACKSTRAND/AFP via Getty Images
Hinton, who is 76 said he was “in a cheap hotel in California” when he heard the news.
“I was going to have an MRI scan today, but I'm going to have to cancel!” he said in Tuesday's press conference.
Hopfield, who is 91was settled in a cottage in England when he found out.
“My wife and I went out to get a flu shot and stopped for a coffee on the way home,” he said. Princeton University Office of Communications. When he got home, he had “a pile of emails” that he said were “warm”.
Winners of the Nobel Prizes in Chemistry, Literature and Peace will be announced later this week, while the prize for economic sciences will be announced next week.
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was given on Monday to UMass Chan School of Medicine Professor Victor Ambros and Harvard Medical School Professor Gary Ruvkun for their discovery of microRNA, which is essential for gene regulation.