New Delhi, Oct 08: The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced on Tuesday.
This year’s two Nobel Laureates in Physics have used tools from physics to develop methods that are the foundation of today’s powerful machine learning.
John Hopfield created an associative memory that can store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns in data.
John Hopfield invented a network that uses a method for saving and recreating patterns.
Geoffrey Hinton invented a method that can autonomously find properties in data, and so perform tasks such as identifying specific elements in pictures.
Geoffrey Hinton used the Hopfield network as the foundation for a new network that uses a different method: the Boltzmann machine. This can learn to recognise characteristic elements in a given type of data.
“The laureates’ work has already been of the greatest benefit. In physics we use artificial neural networks in a vast range of areas, such as developing new materials with specific properties,” says Ellen Moons, Chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics.
