Nobel Prize in physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton for discoveries that enable machine learning [Video]

John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton have been awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for discoveries and inventions that formed the building blocks of machine learning.

Hopfield’s research is carried out at Princeton University and Hinton works at the University of Toronto.

“This year’s two Nobel Laureates in physics have used tools from physics to develop methods that are the foundation of today’s powerful machine learning,” the Nobel committee said in a press release.

Ellen Moons, a member of the Nobel committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said the two laureates “used fundamental concepts from statistical physics to design artificial neural networks that function as associative memories and find patterns in large data sets”.

She said that such networks have been used to advance research in physics and “have also become part …