The downvotes are very unusual to say the least. All the historical material on the subject unambiguously points to neural networks emerging from work done to formalize actual brain neurons. That formalism turns out not to be a great way to explain biological brains but the abstraction it provided proved highly effective for tasks like pattern recognition, classification, and decision making.
So much about computer science has been inspired from other fields such as biology. Polymorphism and object oriented programming, reification, neural networks and in particular convolutional neural networks, genetic algorithms...
If anything, it teaches the value in learning a topic and then applying it directly within computer science. The strength of computer science lies in its ability to adapt and incorporate ideas from other domains to push the boundaries of technology.
There are a lot of downvotes going around because a large contingent is thinking the Nobel Prize for "Physics" should not go to something involving Computer Science. That it was awarded as it was, was an error.
Seemingly because even if the math or algorithms came from a physicist solving physics problems . Since it didn't involve some theoretical particles, it isn't physics'y enough to get a Nobel in Physics.
So much about computer science has been inspired from other fields such as biology. Polymorphism and object oriented programming, reification, neural networks and in particular convolutional neural networks, genetic algorithms...
If anything, it teaches the value in learning a topic and then applying it directly within computer science. The strength of computer science lies in its ability to adapt and incorporate ideas from other domains to push the boundaries of technology.