2024 Nobel Prize in Physics Awarded for Applications of Statistical Physics to Machine Learning!

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to physicist John Hopfield and computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton.

The official prize citation is "for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks". However, I strongly prefer the phrasing along the lines of "for the statistical-physics basis of neural networks", which is how mathematical physicist Barry Simon described it.

Here is the information, press release, and other materials from The Nobel Foundation.

Naturally, I am strongly in favor of more Nobel Prizes being awarded for foundational interdisciplinary work, as that is the world in which I live. Unsurprisingly, many traditional physicists are arguing against and doing their common practice of staking territorial claim (as we also often see on the job market and in other arenas). This is an old battle, and we can look forward to a later phase when somebody gets a physics Nobel Prize for work in networks. That said, I am grateful to see people arguing about science, rather than about other ideological things!