Nobel Prize in Physics awarded for research in neural networks

“This year’s awardees used tools from the field of physics to develop methods that formed the basis of modern machine learning,” he said.

Hopfield created an “associative memory” that can store and retrieve images and other types of patterns in data. Hinton invented a method that can independently detect properties in data and identify specific elements in images.

Hopfield, 91, works at Princeton University. His colleague, Geoffrey Hinton, 76, works at the University of Toronto and in 2012, together with OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever (then a graduate student), developed a neural network capable of recognizing images. The winners will share 11 million Swedish crowns (approximately $1 million) among themselves.

The day before, the Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to American scientists Victor Ambros and Gary Ravkan for the discovery of a microRNA molecule that plays a fundamental role in gene regulation, the Nobel Committee reported.

In the coming days, specialists from other fields will also receive the prize: on October 9 – in chemistry, on October 10 – in literature, on October 11 – the Peace Prize, on October 14 – in economics. The awards ceremony will take place on December 10 in Stockholm and Oslo.