No; The Nobel Committee has done a complete error in judgement with this.
These are Mathematics/CS techniques and nothing whatever to do with core Theoretical/Experimental Physics notwithstanding that they may have been inspired from Physics. There are plenty of Physics Researchers toiling away at real hard problems of the Physical World and instead of recognizing them the Committee has gone with "market fads" which themselves were only realizable due to Hardware advances at scale over the past decade. With this award they have disheartened and demotivated all true Physics Researchers which is a huge disservice to the Hard Science Community.
This is not to say that AI/ML researchers/community are not worthy of recognition. But they should not be folded under Physics rather a new category should have been created and they then awarded under it.
I think there has now been enough crossover between Information Theory and Quantum Mechanics, that we can stop splitting hairs between "it's an algorithm on a computer, that isn't physics".
It's not "splitting hairs" but a logical argument. When Pre-Scientific-Age "Natural Philosophy" was partitioned into "Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Mathematics" etc. there was an understanding of their boundaries (though technically there are none and everything could be argued to be just Physics) and the Nobel prizes were designed accordingly. Now of course we know better and it might be time to come up with something like "Nobel Prize for inter-disciplinary/cross-disciplinary achievements" with the disciplines listed out. So in this case it would mention Biology/Physics/Mathematics/CS.
Physics is pretty old and it has always been about understanding the fundamental structure of reality. If it doesn’t tell you how it all goes round then it is not physics: plain and simple.
Do physicists know the fundamental structure? They have some mathematical approximations that work for some measurements. They can make some predictions in some areas, but the same approximations break down in other areas. So the fundamentals aren't 'known'.
Some think measurements is engineering. So are the physicist that focus on building an apparatus to measure a theory, they are engineers? So only the theoretical people doing math are physicist? Even thought at that point they are only doing math?
Is Information Theory and Entropy a Computer Science subject or a Physics subject?
Physicists have learned quite a bit about the fundamental structure of the cosmos in the last 500 years. We can get into philosophical quibbles over what is knowledge and the relationship between approximations to reality, but we have clearly developed a very rich understanding of how the world works. A lot of the fundamentals are very clearly known. Entropy and statistical mechanics have been part of physics for 150 years and have clearly enhanced our understanding of the universe. Claude Shannon’s work definitively helped us understand the world more deeply. I think deep learning is interesting but it would be a stretch to claim that this has enriched our understanding of the universe by a large margin. Definitely not as much as Shannon’s work.
Funny, on same day there is a post from this guy that seems to think the nature of reality is computation. That the fundamental structure is computation and cellular automata.
Maybe it isn't 'machine learning' but definitely the lines are blurring between physics and other fields of information.
Are experimental Physicist just Engineers?
Are String Theorists just Mathematicians?
Is John von Neumann not a Physicist because he also worked with Computers?
Awful lot of nit-picking in this thread.