Hi I just see the Nobel in Physics announcement. It seems that I’m not the only person who is confused about this. I have an okay understanding of machine learning but I don’t know physics that much. No hate, or gatekeeping science field. Just genuinely curious. TIA.
In: Physics
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There is no Nobel prize of mathematics or computer science but the academy wanted to give a prize related to machine learning and physics was the closest category they had (Remember, the only other prizes are in chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and the Nobel Peace Prize).
I don’t think this has been a particularly good choice for the nobel prize. The main connection here is that some methods from statistical mechanics, which is physics, can be applied to machine learning. Particularly, Hinton developed Boltzmann machines.
But their work in itself is not physics, it’s computer science.
I would argue that anything related to computation or computer science is a type of physics. On account of computers use physics in order to compute. Which, by my own admission, is a very broad take on physics and allows almost anything to be considered part of physics. But one that I still think is fair.
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