Geoffrey Hinton and John Hopfield, pioneers in artificial intelligence win the Nobel Prize in physics

Sunish Surendran

John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton won the Nobel Prize in physics, for helping create the building blocks of machine learning that is revolutionizing the way we work and live.

(Photo | AP)

Hinton, who is known as the Godfather of artificial intelligence, is a citizen of Canada and Britain who works at the University of Toronto and Hopfield is an American working at Princeton.

(Photo | AP)

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.”

(Photo | AP)

Hinton predicted that AI will end up having a “huge influence” on civilization, bringing improvements in productivity and health care.

(Photo | AP)

“Instead of exceeding people in physical strength, it’s going to exceed people in intellectual ability. We have no experience of what it’s like to have things smarter than us. And it’s going to be wonderful in many respects,” Hinton said.

(Photo | AP)

Hinton, now 76, in the 1980s helped develop a technique known as backpropagation that has been instrumental in training machines how to “learn.”

(Photo | AP)
(Photo | AP)