2024 Nobel Prize: John J Hopfield, Geoffrey E Hinton Awarded Nobel Physics Prize

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has named the winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics. As per the official announcement, the Physics Nobel Prize has been jointly awarded to John J Hopfield and Geoffrey E Hinton for their "foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.”

The 2024 Nobel laureates used tools from physics to contrast methods to lay the foundation for machine learning.

As per the committee, Hopfield created the structure which stores and reconstructs information known as the Hopfield Network.

"The Hopfield network can store patterns and has a method for recreating them. When the network is given an incomplete or slightly distorted pattern, the method can find the stored pattern that is most similar."

Geoffrey Hinton invented a method which can "independently discover properties in data" called the Boltzmann machine. This machine, which was developed based on the Hopfield network, can learn to recognise characteristic elements in a given type of data.

"The Boltzmann machine 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."

Together, these have become important elements for the large artificial neural networks which are used in the present day.

John Hopfield is a professor of Molecular Biology at the Neuroscience Institute at Princeton University in the United States and Geoffrey Hinton is a Professor Emeritus for the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto in Canada.