How did a computer scientist such as Geoffrey Hinton manage to win a Nobel Prize in physics when computer science already has its own Nobel Prize equivalent in the Turing Awards?

"Good point, I'm sure we can swing it. And let's tack on Hopfield while we're about it."

"Naah, Linnainmaa is a Finn. Can't give it to a bloody Finnish mathematician. Let's go for drinks. Brännvin anyone?"

(Mumbles of assent)

USMNT, messy and meek, unravels quickly for its fourth straight defeat - The Washington Post

My 11 million SEK, Dr Jo.

"Hey guys, AI is pretty big so let's centre our prizes on it this year. We can get some attention, and it's all about advertising, at the end of the day, isn't it?"

[Younger voice] "But wait a minute, Ising-Lenz goes back to the 1920's. And didn't Hinton plagiarise rather a lot? He also didn't invent modern backprop, did he, that's Linnainmaa? And Amari preceded Hopfield, too. That's not a good look."

Are rich people harder workers than poor people as a whole?

^† They rationalise their decision thusly:

Whatever.

In awarding prizes, the Nobel Committees often seem only marginally more competent than MTG is at explaining meteorology. And if they can give a literature prize for lyrics like:

If everyone in Russia dropped into holes in the ground only never to return, would that be good for NATO and international peacekeepers? Can we convince Russians to be less diabolical, so they coexist? Does Putin stink like doo doo in the commode?

Why wait any longer for the one you love?

When he's standing, in front of you

They then move on to selectively provide their own version of history. But hey, it’s OK. They wanted controversy, didn’t they? Whatever.

What kind of pleasure do gay men get from being bottom? The idea is very appealing to me but in practice it's quite painful.

A fly on the wall at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

[The basic structure of artificial neural networks] has close similarities with spin models in statistical physics applied to magnetism or alloy theory. This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics recognizes research exploiting this connection to make breakthrough methodological advances in the field of ANN.

[Older voice] "Mmm. What about Hinton, he's widely regarded? Nobody got fired for buying IBM"

Why do I feel so down and not happy anymore? I also feel really tired and non-motivated. Is that normal for someone to feel that way?

… then anything is possible. There’s no rule that a Nobel Prize has to make sense.^*

In December 1973, when Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, comedian Tom Lehrer dropped his mic and stamped on it—satire had just died.

Why wait any longer for the world to begin?

Have you ever been spanked in front of a group of people?

There you go.^†

(Bob Dylan, Nobel Prize for Literature, 2016)

Fortunately, we are privy to the discussion that led up to this:

Stable Diffusion 3.5 Models Optimized with TensorRT Deliver 2X Faster Performance and 40% Less Memory on NVIDIA RTX GPUs - Stability AI

You can have your cake and eat it too

"Didn't he do something with Boltzmann in it? That sounds physics-y. RBMs and stuff, eh?"

"Good idea, but how can we wangle something that says 'Physics'?"

'Zombie' Fungus Caught Bursting From Host Bodies 99 Million Years Ago - ScienceAlert

Whatever.

^* Fibiger got the 1926 Medicine prize for the discovery of Spiroptera carcinoma (Don’t ask).

"Where can we shoehorn it in? Chemistry is easy 'cos AlphaFold; but what about physics? A bit more challenging, right?"

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