Two scientists win Nobel Prize in Physics for Artificial Neural Networks

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded on Tuesday to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton for their “foundational discoveries and inventions” that enable machine learning with Artificial Neural Networks.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a statement that this year’s laureates “used tools from physics to construct methods that helped lay the foundation for today’s powerful machine learning”. “Although computers cannot think, machines can now mimic functions such as memory and learning. Hopfield and Hinton have helped make this possible. Using fundamental concepts and methods from physics, they have developed technologies that use structures in networks to process information,” said the Nobel Committee.

John Hopfield created a structure that can store and reconstruct information and Geoffrey Hinton invented a method that can independently discover properties in data and which has become important for the large artificial neural networks now in use.

John J. Hopfield was born in 1933 in Chi
cago in the USA. He obtained a PhD in 1958 from Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA and is a Professor at Princeton University.

Geoffrey E. Hinton was born in 1947 in London in the UK. He obtained a PhD in 1978 from The University of Edinburgh, UK and is a Professor at University of Toronto, Canada.

Source: Kuwait News Agency