“Both of this year’s Nobel Prize winners in physics used the tools of physics to develop methods that are the basis of today’s powerful machine learning systems,” the jury said in its statement.
John Hopfield, 91 and a professor at the prestigious Princeton University, invented a network named after him that uses a method to record and recreate patterns. Geoffrey Hinton, 76 and a professor at the University of Toronto in Canada, then used the Hopfield network as the basis for a new network that uses a different method: the Boltzmann machine.
Their discoveries and inventions enable machine learning through artificial neural networks, which are inspired by the network of neurons in our brain.
“The 2024 laureates used fundamental concepts from statistical physics to design artificial neural networks that function as associative memories and find patterns in large data sets,” said Ellen Moons, chair of the Nobel physics committee, in front of the press.
These artificial neural networks have been used to advance research in fields as diverse as particle physics, materials science, and astrophysics. They have become part of our daily lives, she continued.
The Nobel Prize in Physics comes with a reward of eleven million crowns (970,000 euros). This sum is divided equally between the two winners.
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