How did a computer scientist such as Geoffrey Hinton manage to win a Nobel Prize in physics when computer science already has its own Nobel Prize equivalent in the Turing Awards?

A fly on the wall at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

There you go.^†

^† They rationalise their decision thusly:

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You can have your cake and eat it too

"Good point, I'm sure we can swing it. And let's tack on Hopfield while we're about it."

^* Fibiger got the 1926 Medicine prize for the discovery of Spiroptera carcinoma (Don’t ask).

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(Mumbles of assent)

"Good idea, but how can we wangle something that says 'Physics'?"

In December 1973, when Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, comedian Tom Lehrer dropped his mic and stamped on it—satire had just died.

How is it, in the USA, a country with 334 million people, the choice of President comes down to two aged men, one of whom is a liar as well as a criminal, one who appears to be on his way to dementia. Surely a democratic country can put up better?

… then anything is possible. There’s no rule that a Nobel Prize has to make sense.^*

Whatever.

"Naah, Linnainmaa is a Finn. Can't give it to a bloody Finnish mathematician. Let's go for drinks. Brännvin anyone?"

What is the difference between the Bible and the Qur'an?

"Didn't he do something with Boltzmann in it? That sounds physics-y. RBMs and stuff, eh?"

Why wait any longer for the one you love?

[Older voice] "Mmm. What about Hinton, he's widely regarded? Nobody got fired for buying IBM"

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They then move on to selectively provide their own version of history. But hey, it’s OK. They wanted controversy, didn’t they? Whatever.

"Hey guys, AI is pretty big so let's centre our prizes on it this year. We can get some attention, and it's all about advertising, at the end of the day, isn't it?"

Whatever.

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My 11 million SEK, Dr Jo.

When he's standing, in front of you

In awarding prizes, the Nobel Committees often seem only marginally more competent than MTG is at explaining meteorology. And if they can give a literature prize for lyrics like:

Is it okay if I am not interested to talk to any of my relatives as I saw the real faces in my brother's marriage as none of them helped us rather were a kind of disappointment and were talking bad?

(Bob Dylan, Nobel Prize for Literature, 2016)

Fortunately, we are privy to the discussion that led up to this:

[Younger voice] "But wait a minute, Ising-Lenz goes back to the 1920's. And didn't Hinton plagiarise rather a lot? He also didn't invent modern backprop, did he, that's Linnainmaa? And Amari preceded Hopfield, too. That's not a good look."

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[The basic structure of artificial neural networks] has close similarities with spin models in statistical physics applied to magnetism or alloy theory. This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics recognizes research exploiting this connection to make breakthrough methodological advances in the field of ANN.

"Where can we shoehorn it in? Chemistry is easy 'cos AlphaFold; but what about physics? A bit more challenging, right?"

Why wait any longer for the world to begin?

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