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.
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.