Pioneers in expert system win the Nobel Prize in physics

STOCKHOLM (AP)– Two leaders of expert system– John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton– won the Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for aiding develop the foundation of artificial intelligence that is transforming the means we function and live however additionally produces brand-new hazards to mankind, among the champions claimed.

Hinton, that is called the Godfather of artificial intelligence, is a resident of Canada and Britain that operates at the University of Toronto and Hopfield is an American operating at Princeton.

“This year’s two Nobel Laureates in physics have used tools from physics to develop methods that are the foundation of today’s powerful machine learning,” the Nobel board claimed in a news release.

Ellen Moons, a participant of the Nobel board at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, claimed both laureates “used fundamental concepts from statistical physics to design artificial neural networks that function as associative memories and find patterns in large data sets.”

She claimed that such networks have actually been made use of to progress study in physics and “have also become part of our daily lives, for instance in facial recognition and language translation.”

Hinton forecasted that AI will certainly wind up having a “huge influence” on world, bringing enhancements in efficiency and healthcare.

“It would be comparable with the Industrial Revolution,” he claimed outdoors phone call with press reporters and the authorities from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

“Instead of exceeding people in physical strength, it’s going to exceed people in intellectual ability. We have no experience of what it’s like to have things smarter than us. And it’s going to be wonderful in many respects,” Hinton claimed. “But we also have to worry about a number of possible bad consequences, particularly the threat of these things getting out of control.”

The Nobel board that recognized the scientific research behind artificial intelligence and AI additionally pointed out anxieties concerning its feasible flipside. Moon claimed that while it has “enormous benefits, its rapid 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.”

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Hinton shares those concerns. He quit a role at Google so he could more freely speak about the dangers of the technology he helped create.

On Tuesday, he said he was shocked at the honor.

“I’m flabbergasted. I had, no idea this would happen,” he said when reached by the Nobel committee on the phone.

Hinton, now 76, in the 1980s helped develop a technique known as backpropagation that has been instrumental in training machines how to “learn.”

His team at the University of Toronto later wowed peers by using a neural network to win the prestigious ImageNet computer vision competition in 2012. That win spawned a flurry of copycats, giving birth to the rise of modern AI.

Hinton and fellow AI scientists Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun won computer science’s top prize, the Turing Award, in 2019.

“For a long time, people thought what the three of us were doing was nonsense,” Hinton told The Associated Press in 2019. “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 are doing is silly.”

Hopfield, 91, created an associative memory that can store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns in data, the Nobel committee said. Hinton used Hopfield’s network as the foundation for a new network that uses a different method, known as the Boltzmann machine, that the committee said can learn to recognise characteristic elements in a given type of data.

Six days of Nobel announcements opened Monday with Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun winning the medicine prize for their discovery of tiny bits of genetic material that serve as on and off switches inside cells that help control what the cells do and when they do it. If scientists can better understand how they work and how to manipulate them, it could one day lead to powerful treatments for diseases like cancer.

The physics prize brings a cash money honor of 11 million Swedish kronor ($ 1 million) from a legacy left by the honor’s developer, Swedish creatorAlfred Nobel The laureates are welcomed to get their honors at events onDec 10, the wedding anniversary of Nobel’s fatality.

Nobel news proceed with the chemistry physics reward on Wednesday and literary works onThursday The Nobel Peace Prize will certainly be introduced Friday and the business economics honor onOct 14.

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Corder reported from The Hague,Netherlands Associated Press press reporter Matt O’Brien added from Providence, Rhode Island.

Daniel Niemann And Mike Corder, The Associated Press