The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics goes to John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics was won by John J. Hopfield and Jeffrey E. Hinton. The official citation from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences is for “fundamental discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning using artificial neural networks.” The two scientists laid the foundations for machine learning and the development of artificial intelligence.

Chicago-born Hopfield, 81, teaches at Princeton University in the United States. London-born Hinton, 76, is a professor at the University of Toronto in Canada. “This year’s two Nobel Prize winners in physics, the Swedish Academy explained in a note, have used the tools of physics to develop methods that form the basis of today’s powerful machine learning. John Hopfield created associative memory that can store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns in data. Geoffrey Hinton invented a method that can independently find properties in data and then perform tasks such as identifying specific elements in images».

Hinton is considered one of the fathers of artificial intelligence. After a decade-long collaboration with Google, he resigned in 2023, warning of “too many risks” to this technology.. He entered Mountain View’s orbit after the acquisition of a company he founded with two of his students (one of whom is Ilya Sutskever, who worked at OpenAI): the three developed a neural network that learned on its own to identify commonalities after analyzing thousands of images.
To the question asked D. New York Times If artificial intelligence can “outperform” the human mind that designed it, Hinton replied, “Most people think that’s completely beside the point. I think so, too.” I thought it was 30 to 50 years or more away. Obviously I don’t think so anymore».

The two scientists, who have been working independently since the 1980s, have opened up a new field of research, leading to important developments. To the point of making artificial intelligence systems possible and revolutionizing scientific research and everyday life.
Currently, computers and robots cannot think, but thanks to neural networks they can imitate some complex functions typical of the human brain, such as memory and learning. Thanks to the research of Hopfield and Hinton, we moved to machine learning, where a computer acquires information through examples and on this basis is able to tackle problems that are too ambiguous and complex to be managed with specific instructions. An example of this is interpreting an image to determine the objects it contains.

Last year the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Kroesz and Anne Lhuillier “For experimental methods that generate pulses of advertising light Attosecond To study the dynamics of electrons in matter.

In 2021, the Italian physicist Giorgio Parisi He had won the award “for his discovery of the interaction of turbulence and fluctuations in physical systems from the atomic to the planetary levels.”

This is the 118th time the Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded: In all, 227 prizes were awarded, awarded to 226 scientists, with John Bardeen having won them twice (in 1956 and 1972).. Lawrence Bragg is the youngest winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics: he was 25 when he received recognition in 1915. Arthur Ashkin, the oldest: Nobel Prize in 2018 at the age of 96.