Geoffrey Hinton from University of Toronto awarded Nobel Prize in Physics

Scientists Geoffrey Hinton from the University of Toronto and John Hopfield of Princeton University were honoured with the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning within artificial neural networks, the award-giving body said on Tuesday.

Hinton, born in Britain, has spent the last decade splitting his time between teaching computer science at the University of Toronto and working for Google's deep-learning artificial intelligence team, before announcing his resignation from the Alphabet company in 2023.

"I'm flabbergasted," Hinton told the panel gathered at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm by phone. "I had no idea this would happen. I'm very surprised."

Ellen Moons, a member of the Nobel committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said the two 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 said that such networks have been used to advance research in physics and "have also become part of our daily lives, for instance in facial recognition and language translation."

Hopfield created an associative memory that can store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns in data, the academy said.

Hinton invented a method that can autonomously find properties in data and carry out tasks such as identifying specific elements in pictures, it added.

The work of the two prize winners was closely connected. In an interview with News Network earlier this morning, Hinton said that in fact, one of his most influential mentors was on of Hopfield's students, Terry Sejnowski, who worked with him on his "most exciting research" how to make "Hopfield networks" more general.

Hinton said he believed the effects of the advancements in artificial intelligence will be comparable to those of the Industrial Revolution, leading to large gains in productivity and offering efficiencies through the development of artificial intelligence assistants that will help in many sectors, including in the delivery of health care.

"It's going to be fantastic, which is why progress is not going to be stopped. I don't