The Nobel Prize in Physics for neural networks
John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton received the Nobel Prize in Physics for discoveries that enabled machine learning with artificial neural networks.
Why it matters
Physics claimed as its own the work that in the 1980s was treated as peripheral to both disciplines at once.
Both cited works came out of statistical physics: the Hopfield network describes memory through the energy of a system, and the Boltzmann machine takes a distribution named after a physicist. The prize drew an argument about whether it was physics at all, and Hinton, who by then had left Google in order to speak freely about the risks, used the platform to speak about them. Symbolically the award closed a circle: the technique whose funding was cut off in the 1970s was recognised forty years later as fundamental.