٠٠:٠٣:٢٤Physicists John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton were jointly awarded the 118th Nobel Prize in Physics by the Nobel Committee for Physics at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on Tuesday in Stockholm.
The American and British-Canadian scientists were bestowed the highest award in physics for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.
91-year-old Hopfield created a network, which can store and regenerate patterns, while his 76-year-old colleague Hopfield used the Hopfield network as a base for a new network. However, the new network uses a different method - the Boltzmann machine – and can be trained to identify characteristic elements in a given type of data.
"So here, the focus is on statistical distributions of patterns rather than individual patterns. It is a generative model - once trained, it can be used to generate new instances from the learned distribution," explained Anders Irback, a professor in theoretical physics and member of the Nobel Committee for Physics.
"It had the same basic structure as Hopfield's network, but there were two types of nodes, hidden and visible ones, and the hidden nodes were there to make it possible for a network to learn more general distributions," he continued.
The discoveries of the two scientists are expected to have a wide-ranging impact across various fields. These include advancements in particle physics, astrophysics, material modeling, as well as in more surprising fields like protein structure prediction and the analysis of medical imagery.
The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics came with a prize sum of 11 million Swedish crowns (1.1 million USD).
Advancing machine learning and AI! 118th Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton in Stockholm
Physicists John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton were jointly awarded the 118th Nobel Prize in Physics by the Nobel Committee for Physics at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on Tuesday in Stockholm.
The American and British-Canadian scientists were bestowed the highest award in physics for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.
91-year-old Hopfield created a network, which can store and regenerate patterns, while his 76-year-old colleague Hopfield used the Hopfield network as a base for a new network. However, the new network uses a different method - the Boltzmann machine – and can be trained to identify characteristic elements in a given type of data.
"So here, the focus is on statistical distributions of patterns rather than individual patterns. It is a generative model - once trained, it can be used to generate new instances from the learned distribution," explained Anders Irback, a professor in theoretical physics and member of the Nobel Committee for Physics.
"It had the same basic structure as Hopfield's network, but there were two types of nodes, hidden and visible ones, and the hidden nodes were there to make it possible for a network to learn more general distributions," he continued.
The discoveries of the two scientists are expected to have a wide-ranging impact across various fields. These include advancements in particle physics, astrophysics, material modeling, as well as in more surprising fields like protein structure prediction and the analysis of medical imagery.
The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics came with a prize sum of 11 million Swedish crowns (1.1 million USD).
Physicists John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton were jointly awarded the 118th Nobel Prize in Physics by the Nobel Committee for Physics at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on Tuesday in Stockholm.
The American and British-Canadian scientists were bestowed the highest award in physics for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.
91-year-old Hopfield created a network, which can store and regenerate patterns, while his 76-year-old colleague Hopfield used the Hopfield network as a base for a new network. However, the new network uses a different method - the Boltzmann machine – and can be trained to identify characteristic elements in a given type of data.
"So here, the focus is on statistical distributions of patterns rather than individual patterns. It is a generative model - once trained, it can be used to generate new instances from the learned distribution," explained Anders Irback, a professor in theoretical physics and member of the Nobel Committee for Physics.
"It had the same basic structure as Hopfield's network, but there were two types of nodes, hidden and visible ones, and the hidden nodes were there to make it possible for a network to learn more general distributions," he continued.
The discoveries of the two scientists are expected to have a wide-ranging impact across various fields. These include advancements in particle physics, astrophysics, material modeling, as well as in more surprising fields like protein structure prediction and the analysis of medical imagery.
The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics came with a prize sum of 11 million Swedish crowns (1.1 million USD).