Pioneers in artificial intelligence win the Nobel Prize in physics

Stockholm:Two pioneers of artificial intelligence John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton won the Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for helping create the...

Stockholm: Two pioneers of artificial intelligence - John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton - won the Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for helping create the building blocks of machine learning that is revolutionizing the way we work and live but also creates new threats to humanity, one of the winners said.

Hinton, who is known as the Godfather of artificial intelligence, is a citizen of Canada and Britain who works at the University of Toronto and Hopfield is an American working at Princeton.

"These two gentlemen were really the pioneers,” said Nobel physics committee member Mark Pearce. "They were the persons who did the fundamental work, based on physical

understanding which has led to the revolution we see today in machine learning and artificial intelligence.”

The artificial neural networks they pioneered are used throughout science and medicine and "have also become part of our daily lives, for instance in facial recognition and language translation," said Ellen Moons, a member of the Nobel committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences,