The two winners devoted their work, which dates back to the 1980s, to “machine learning”, used in the development of artificial intelligence methods, using physics tools.
The artificial neural networks designed by the two professors “operate like associative memories and find patterns in large data sets,” the president of the Nobel physics committee, Ellen Moons, told the press.
These models “have been used to advance research in fields as diverse as particle physics, materials science and astrophysics, and they have become part of our daily lives” such as facial recognition and machine translation, she continued.
John Hopfield, 91, is a professor at the prestigious Princeton University in the United States.
As for Geoffrey Hinton (76 years old), he is a professor at the University of Toronto in Canada and considered one of the founding fathers of artificial intelligence.
