I am really surprised. I would have guessed that a Nobel Prize would be awarded to advancements in the field itself. Not for inspirations from it or to tools that led to advancements. Although as I write this I'm sure there have been several prizes awarded to scientists / engineers who have developed tools to advance physics. Like radio astronomy? Still surprised though.
Some other recent cases of the prize being given to an engineering contribution:
- 2018 was for chirped pulse amplification, which is most commonly used in medicine (LASIK surgery for example)
- 2014 was for basically for LED lights
- 2010 was for a method for producing graphene
- 2009 was for both charge-coupled device, which is a component for digital imaging (including regular consumer digital cameras), and fibre-optic cables
Well yeah, so are neural nets. I just meant that these are engineering accomplishments, not scientific per se. Of course experimental science will often take advantage of cutting edge technology, including from computer science.
NNs have absolutely revolutionized systems biology (itself a John Hopfield joint, and the AlphaFold team are reasonably likely to get a Nobel for medicine and physiology, possibly as soon as 'this year') and are becoming relevant in all kinds of weird parts of solid-state physics (trained functionals for DFT, eg https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-64619-8).
The idea that academic disciplines are in any way isolated from each other is nonsense. Machine learning is computer science; it's also information theory; that means it's thermodynamics, which means it's physics. (Or, rather, it can be understood properly through all of these lenses).
John Hopfield himself has written about this; he views his work as physics because _it is performed from the viewpoint of a physicist_. Disciplines are subjective, not objective, phenomena.
My personal theory is that Demis and John will win the Chemistry prize for AlphaFold this year and that they decided to also award this one to help bolster the idea that ML is making fundamental improvements in academic science.
I would prefer if there was an actual Nobel Prize for Mathematics (not sure if the Fields would become that, or a new prize created).
I did have a similar thought, but awarding a prize to AF this year would be a very bold move, given how things went today. Right folks, we've demoralized all the physicists today, tomorrow we can do the same for the chemists!
To be perfectly honest, I'm not really sure the physics community being demoralized by this prize award is a really negative thing. I think many aspects of HEP and other areas have stagnated, requiring exponentially more money for marginal gains (I don't have a problem with LIGO or other large projects, but "we found another high energy particle consistent with the standard models" not so much). Perhaps this prize will give the community a shot in the arm to move away from "safe but boring".
