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American John Hopfield, shared Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on machine learning

Eight U.S. scientists have won the prestigious award in the last decade.

Premio Nobel de Física: anuncio del Nobel para John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton

Nobel Prize announcement for Hopfield and HintonYouTube/Nobel Prize.

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Víctor Mendoza

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American John Hopfield and British-Canadian Geoffrey Hinton won the Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday for their pioneering work on machine learning, a tool used in the development of artificial intelligence (AI), AFP reports.

"The two winners of this year's Nobel Prize in Physics employed tools from physics to develop methods that are the basis of today's powerful machine learning systems," the jury said in a statement.

With this award, the 91-year-old scientist, a native of Chicago, becomes the eighth U.S.-born Nobel laureate in the last ten years. After receiving a doctorate from Cornell University in 1958, he is now a professor at Princeton.

"I am amazed. I didn't imagine this could happen," Hinton reacted. He also acknowledged that he is an avid user of AI tools such as ChatGPT, but admitted that he worries about the potential repercussions of the technology he helped spawn.

"He has created an associative memory capable of storing and reconstructing images and other types of patterns in data," the committee explained Hopfield's advances. "Hopfield's network can store patterns and has a method for recreating them. When the network receives an incomplete or slightly distorted pattern, the method can find the most similar stored pattern."

Possible implications

The Nobel in physics is the second Nobel Prize of the season, after the Nobel for Medicine  was awarded on Monday to U.S. scientists Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun.

Last year, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to French-Swedish Anne L'Huillier, Frenchman Pierre Agostini and Austro-Hungarian Ferenc Krausz for their research on tools for exploring electrons inside atoms and molecules.

The award season continues this week with the announcement of the winner(s) of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on Wednesday, followed by the long-awaited Literature Prize on Thursday and the Peace Prize on Friday. The Economics Prize will close the season on Monday, October 14.

Each Nobel prize catagory awards a prize of 1 million Swedish kronor, (more than 970,000 euros or $1 million).

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