Developers of AI Methods Win Nobel Prize in Physics

Two early developers of artificial intelligence (AI) have won this year's Nobel Prize in Physics.

American John Hopfield is with Princeton University in New Jersey. Geoffrey Hinton is a citizen of Canada and Britain who works at the University of Toronto.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences honored them for helping “to develop methods that are the foundation of today's powerful machine learning.”

The 76-year-old Hinton is known as the Godfather of artificial intelligence for his part in developing machine learning. However, he also has warned that AI has created threats to humanity.

Ellen Moons is a member of the Nobel committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Moons said the two scientists “used fundamental concepts from statistical physics to design artificial neural networks that function as associative memories and find patterns in large data sets.”

Moons added that their research has been used to make progress in physics but has also become part of people's daily lives. Technologies like facial recognition and language translation are used every day.

Hinton predicted that AI would have a “huge influence” on civilization and will bring improvements to productivity and health care. He told reporters and Royal Academy officials that, “It would be comparable to the Industrial Revolution.”

The Industrial Revolution was a period of intensive development of machines and manufacturing that started more than 250 years ago in Britain.

Hinton said, “Instead of exceeding people in physical strength, it's going to exceed people in intellectual ability.” But Hinton also expressed concern about the possible bad results of AI, especially noting, in his words, “the threat of these things getting out of control.”

The Nobel committee also recognized the possible damage the discoveries that it was honoring could cause. Moons said AI's “development has also raised concerns about our future. Collectively, humans carry the responsibility for using this new technology in a safe and ethical way for the greatest benefit of humankind.”

What they did

In the 1980s, Hinton helped to develop a method known as backpropagation, which is used to “train” computers to learn.

Later, he headed a team at the University of Toronto that won the ImageNet computer competition in 2012 for designing a “neural network.”

Hinton and AI scientists Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun won the Turing Award in 2019. It is the top award in computer science. That year, Hinton told the Associated Press about the reaction he and his fellow researchers received over their work.

“They thought we were very misguided and what we were doing was a very surprising thing for apparently intelligent people to waste their time on. My message to young researchers is, don't be put off if everyone tells you what you are doing is silly.”

Hopfield is now 91 years old. The Nobel committee said he “invented a network that uses a method for saving and recreating patterns.”

Hinton used Hopfield's network to create a new network using a different method known as the Boltzmann machine. The committee said this “machine” can learn to recognize elements in a particular kind of data.

“What fascinates me most is still this question of how mind comes from machine,” Hopfield said in a video posted online by The Franklin Institute after it awarded him a physics prize in 2019.

The Nobel Prize in Physics is valued at $1 million. Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel created the prizes to honor discoveries that help humanity. The first prizes were awarded in 1901.

On Wednesday, the prize in chemistry will be announced, on Thursday, the prize for literature, and Friday, the peace prize. And, the Nobel for economics will be announced on Monday.

The winners receive their prizes in ceremonies held on December 10.

I'm Ashley Thompson.

Daniel Niemann and Mike Corder reported this story for the Associated Press. Mario Ritter, Jr. adapted it for VOA Learning English.

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Words in This Story

concept –n. a general idea

statistical –adj. related to facts or information that is in the form of numbers

associative –adj. of or relating to association, connection or linkage

memory –n. the power or process of reproducing or recalling what has been learned and retained especially through associative mechanisms

neural –adj. like a brain or nerve cells

function –n. the job or task that something does

pattern –n. images, objects or elements that are repeated in a recognizable way

translation –n. to take writing in one language and recreate its meaning in another language

consequence –n. the results of an action