Geoffrey Hinton Awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics
October 8, 2024
ACM A.M. Turing Award recipient Geoffrey Hinton has been awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences along with John J. Hopfield "for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks." The laureates used tools from physics to develop methods that are the foundation of today’s powerful machine learning.
Hopfield invented a network that uses a method for saving and recreating patterns, and Hinton used the Hopfield network as the foundation for a new network that uses a different method: the Boltzmann machine. The machine is trained by feeding it examples that are very likely to arise when the machine is run, and can be used to classify images or create new examples of the type of pattern on which it was trained. Hinton has built upon this work, helping initiate the current explosive development of machine learning.
Hinton received the 2018 A.M. Turing Award with Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun for conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that have made deep neural networks a critical component of computing.
