Using tools from physics to create something that is popular but unrelated to physics is enough for the nobel prize in physics?
So, if say a physicist creates a new recipe for the world’s greatest potato casserole, and it becomes popular everywhere, and they used some physics for creating the recipe to calculate the best heat distribution or whatever, then that’s enough?
Using tools from physics to create something that is popular but unrelated to physics is enough for the nobel prize in physics?
If only, it’s not even that! Neither Boltzmann machines nor Hopfield networks led to anything used in the modern spam and deepfake generating AI, nor in image recognition AI, or the like. This is the kind of stuff that struggles to get above 60% accuracy on MNIST (hand written digits).
Hinton went on to do some different stuff based on backpropagation and gradient descent, on newer computers than those who came up with it long before him, and so he got Turing Award for that, and it’s a wee bit controversial because of the whole “people doing it before, but on worse computers, and so they didn’t get any award” thing, but at least it is for work that is on the path leading to modern AI and not for work that is part of the vast list of things that just didn’t work and it’s extremely hard to explain why you would even think they would work in the first place.
So Geoffrey Hinton is a total dork.
Hopefully, [this Nobel Prize] will make me more credible when I say these things really do understand what they’re saying. [There] is a whole school of linguistics that comes from Chomsky that thinks it’s nonsense to say these things understand language. That school is wrong. Neural nets are much better at processing language than anything produced by the Chomsky school of linguistics.
Neural nets are much better at processing language than anything produced by the Chomsky school of linguistics.
Hey mate, did you get your PhD or a fucking Nobel in linguistics by any chance? No? Just talking about shit you apparently have no idea about?
I didn’t even know you could be a crank about linguistics, that’s pretty amazing. What other otherwise really boring fields are you going to tackle, geodesy?
Hey mate, did you get your PhD or a fucking Nobel in linguistics by any chance?
Early onset Nobel disease.
I’m just waiting for him to chime in about music theory.
A popular meme on social media makes a series of allegations about the musical tune pitch A=432Hz and A=440Hz, including that the latter was a standard imposed by the Nazis to manipulate their enemies.
spittake
Multiple experts told Reuters these allegations are unfounded.
NO WAY
Thanks Reuters.
since 1953 all music has been tuned to 440Hz. This frequency has NO SCIENTIFIC RELATIONSHIP with our universe and actually causes the brain to become agitated.
fuck yes, this is the random all-caps crankery I get out of bed for! I love the idea that 440hz agitates the brain, but not in a scientific way (at least not for our universe?)
since 1969 all computers have been running Unix. This operating system has NO SCIENTIFIC RELATIONSHIP with our universe and actually causes the brain to become agitated.
there’s plenty of linguistics cranks, but most of them have nationalistic tint, like people thinking that all languages come from turkish or something like that
like people thinking that all languages come from turkish
This is amazing, I fucking love this. People striving to create the lowest stakes possible conspiracy. I struggle to think of something that would have less impact on the world no matter it were true or false.
A shadowy cabal of powerful people guarding the secret of “actually, it was [rolls die] Turkish people who invented [rolls another die] language!”
then think again, because it was a part of continuing series: turkish nationalism
Okay sure, but this is comical. A Turkish nationalist will be a Turkish nationalist with or without this idea. It’s the equivalent of saying that Turkish people have naturally less odorous farts and thus TURKIYE SHALL RULE THE WORLD!
okay but this idea was kinda central to modern turkish nationalism. see, kurds are not distinct people, they just speak turkish but wrong (heard anything similar recently?) also this is part of the reason why standard turkish is actual common language in turkey
oh, it’s like russia’s idea of ukrainian and belarussian. fucking orphans of the empires…
Sneers from r/physics! First up, this comment by napqe:
I’m sorry, but this is like awarding the nobel prize for literature to Xerox/HP/Brother for “improvements to printing”.
And in the same thread, from GustapheOfficial:
Last year’s prize was too relevant, they had to stagger the physics by a year.
We also have this by M1st_:
What’s next? Someone gets a Nobel prize for another algorithm that numerically solves differential equations??
Finally, we’ve the title of this thread, by TheSkells:
Yeah, “physics”
Nobel prize in Physics for attempting to use physics in AI but it didn’t really work very well and then one of the guys working on a better more pure mathematics approach that actually worked and got the Turing Award for the latter, but that’s not what the prize is for, while the other guy did some other work, but that is not what the prize is for. AI will solve all physics!!!111
Given how much money is being
wastedinvested in AI, they should have given them the Economics prize.nobel committee went full on ai-brained this year, nobel prize in chemistry is for alphafold. they had three good years in a row, had to do something stupid ig
lol that’s gonna age like milk
still better than peace prize for kissinger
The “everything is physics” crowd is awfully silent right now 🤔
The Nobel Prize committee really seem to be trying hard to make this the worst set of awardees ever, aren’t they? All we need is another Kissinger-esque situation for the Peace Prize and a Handke-esque situation for the Literature prize and they’ll have disgraced the Nobel Prizes permanently.
I was going to suggest Vitalik Buterin for the Fake Nobel of Economics as a bit, but the coiners already beat me to it.
So my next choices for the award would be SBF or Bored Ape Yacht Club.
Netanyahu for the peace prize, is Vance for literature.
Out of curiosity, are they using any of his underlying ML techniques to analyze imaging/other data collection before using it in actual physics models?
Well, just about every data analysis technique ever invented has been applied in physics somewhere. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on applying a genetic algorithm to electron-atom scattering in particle detectors, a topic which I recall someone had already tried neural networks on.
That’s what I’m wondering. It’s not wild to give him a prize in physics if his techniques led to advancement in physics.
“CS is applied math, not applied physics” like physics isn’t just applied math to model real world data is kind of weird, especially if his particular math actually got used in physics. That’s pretty much what calculus was.
I don’t think that Donald Knuth deserves a physics prize for inventing TeX, even though TeX was a massive contribution to how we communicate physics.
Knuth should have a special Nobel Prize for Being Donald Motherfuckin’ Knuth.
He did, it’s the Turing Award.
I’m not sure how that’s the same thing.
Typesetting papers isn’t the same as developing mathematical methods that directly enable new solutions.
Providing the medium through which, to a rough approximation, all physics is discussed is, proportionally, a vastly greater contribution than any technique that only applies to a fraction of problems.
But the more salient point is that the Nobel Prize is an institution that we should, as a culture, care less about. And all the more so now, since they are getting in on the hype about an industry that is fundamentally anti-scientific.
