Japanese scientists were pioneers of AI

Computer science has a long tradition of not or misattributing inventions. Unsurprisingly, the early contributions from Japan can be found in the historical summaries by Schmidhuber (see e.g. https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/deep-learning-history.html), who seems to be one of the few who cares about mentioning the correct authors.

It's an opinion piece to some extent of course, and usually I'm not too keen on some sort of Nobel laureate whataboutism, but it's interesting history which is probably really not as widely known as it should be.

I didn't think of it myself at first, but after having it pointed out to me that Fukushima is still alive to receive a prize it actually seems like a missed opportunity.

Maybe just slightly too difficult to shoehorn into the Physics prize though, which already had to stretch its boundaries a bit for Hopfield Nets and Boltzmann machines. Maybe Physiology or Medicine should do one too?