Just watched the nobel prize live stream, surprised by the topic, looks very engineering to me rather than physics, do algorithms make physics subsidiary?
The most important factor tends to be the positive impact on society, as that's one of the price's core tenets.
Making it even more baffling that this won then
What about;
- Improved weather forecasts
- Protein folding
- Medical imaging and diagnostics
- Text-to-speech and voice recognition
- Language Translation
- Finance fraud detection
- Supply chain and logistics optimization
- Natural disaster prediction
One could also argue that in 1895, applied computer science and information theory would be considered physics.
Also, it's a price based on a will from over 100 years ago, managed by a private institution. The institution can be as arbitrary as it wants. They don't need to answer to anyone.
Coincidently, Giorgio Parisi got the 2021 Nobel prize for his work on spin glasses
- 2018 was for chirped pulse amplification, which is most commonly used in medicine (LASIK surgery for example)
- 2014 was for basically for LED lights
- 2010 was for a method for producing graphene
- 2009 was for both charge-coupled device, which is a component for digital imaging (including regular consumer digital cameras), and fibre-optic cables
The idea that academic disciplines are in any way isolated from each other is nonsense. Machine learning is computer science; it's also information theory; that means it's thermodynamics, which means it's physics. (Or, rather, it can be understood properly through all of these lenses).
John Hopfield himself has written about this; he views his work as physics because _it is performed from the viewpoint of a physicist_. Disciplines are subjective, not objective, phenomena.
I would prefer if there was an actual Nobel Prize for Mathematics (not sure if the Fields would become that, or a new prize created).