Connectionists: 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics goes to Hopfield and Hinton

[James V Stone]

A snippet of history.

How the Boltzmann Machine was born: 

 "John Hopfield gave a talk, and I was sitting next to Geoff Hinton, and Hopfield was saying, “We could do optimisation here”, . . . and that was something we were interested in. I had just read an article by Scott Kirkpatrick on simulated annealing, and I said, “Geoff, we could heat it up, we could heat up the Hopfield network by adding a temperature”, so instead of always going downhill sometimes you pop up and with that, if you slowly cool it we can find the optimal solution. . . . It turns out something magical happens when you heat up a Hopfield network: it becomes capable of learning the weights to a multi-layer network; which is the first time that had been done."
 T Sejnowski, 2023. 

 Quoted from: The Artificial Intelligence Papers: Original Research Papers With Tutorial Commentaries. 
 TOC and Chapter 1: https://jamesstone.sites.sheffield.ac.uk/books

-- 
James V Stone 
Visiting Professor, 
Sheffield University, UK. 
Web: https://jamesstone.sites.sheffield.ac.uk/books 

> On 8 Oct 2024, at 11:19, Barak A. Pearlmutter <barak at pearlmutter.net> wrote:
> 
> The Nobel Prize in Physics 2024 was awarded to John J. Hopfield and
> Geoffrey E. Hinton "for foundational discoveries and inventions that
> enable machine learning with artificial neural networks"
> 
> https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2024/summary/
> 
> Congratulations, and well deserved!