How physics and machine studying joined forces to win the Physics Nobel ‘24
The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics was simply introduced on 2024–10–04, and this 12 months’s award went to Prof. John Hopfield and Prof. Geoffrey Hinton. However it’s a bit totally different this time. As an alternative of the same old discoveries concerning the pure world, the prize was awarded for one thing a little bit extra synthetic:
“for foundational discoveries and innovations that allow machine studying with synthetic neural networks.”
Two machine studying (ML) fashions had been highlighted: the Hopfield community and the Boltzmann machine. This will likely shock some, as ML can appear far faraway from physics. Nevertheless, many early foundational ML ideas had been impressed by bodily programs.
What was the importance of the award? I consider it was to focus on latest superior in generative AI (in textual content/picture/video generations), and to remind us that the foundations of those fashionable fashions are rooted in physics. Extra particularly, Hopfield networks and Boltzmann machines will be considered a number of the authentic generative fashions, borrowing physics ideas from pure…
