Nobel prize in Physics for attempting to use physics in AI but it didn’t really work very well and then one of the guys working on a better more pure mathematics approach that actually worked and got the Turing Award for the latter, but that’s not what the prize is for, while the other guy did some other work, but that is not what the prize is for. AI will solve all physics!!!111
The Nobel Prize committee really seem to be trying hard to make this the worst set of awardees ever, aren’t they? All we need is another Kissinger-esque situation for the Peace Prize and a Handke-esque situation for the Literature prize and they’ll have disgraced the Nobel Prizes permanently.
I was going to suggest Vitalik Buterin for the Fake Nobel of Economics as a bit, but the coiners already beat me to it.
So my next choices for the award would be SBF or Bored Ape Yacht Club.
Sneers from r/physics! First up, this comment by napqe:
I’m sorry, but this is like awarding the nobel prize for literature to Xerox/HP/Brother for “improvements to printing”.
And in the same thread, from GustapheOfficial:
Last year’s prize was too relevant, they had to stagger the physics by a year.
We also have this by M1st_:
What’s next? Someone gets a Nobel prize for another algorithm that numerically solves differential equations??
Finally, we’ve the title of this thread, by TheSkells:
Yeah, “physics”
Using tools from physics to create something that is popular but unrelated to physics is enough for the nobel prize in physics?
So, if say a physicist creates a new recipe for the world’s greatest potato casserole, and it becomes popular everywhere, and they used some physics for creating the recipe to calculate the best heat distribution or whatever, then that’s enough?
Using tools from physics to create something that is popular but unrelated to physics is enough for the nobel prize in physics?
If only, it’s not even that! Neither Boltzmann machines nor Hopfield networks led to anything used in the modern spam and deepfake generating AI, nor in image recognition AI, or the like. This is the kind of stuff that struggles to get above 60% accuracy on MNIST (hand written digits).
Hinton went on to do some different stuff based on backpropagation and gradient descent, on newer computers than those who came up with it long before him, and so he got Turing Award for that, and it’s a wee bit controversial because of the whole “people doing it before, but on worse computers, and so they didn’t get any award” thing, but at least it is for work that is on the path leading to modern AI and not for work that is part of the vast list of things that just didn’t work and it’s extremely hard to explain why you would even think they would work in the first place.
The “everything is physics” crowd is awfully silent right now 🤔
So Geoffrey Hinton is a total dork.
Hopefully, [this Nobel Prize] will make me more credible when I say these things really do understand what they’re saying. [There] is a whole school of linguistics that comes from Chomsky that thinks it’s nonsense to say these things understand language. That school is wrong. Neural nets are much better at processing language than anything produced by the Chomsky school of linguistics.
Neural nets are much better at processing language than anything produced by the Chomsky school of linguistics.
Hey mate, did you get your PhD or a fucking Nobel in linguistics by any chance? No? Just talking about shit you apparently have no idea about?
I didn’t even know you could be a crank about linguistics, that’s pretty amazing. What other otherwise really boring fields are you going to tackle, geodesy?
there’s plenty of linguistics cranks, but most of them have nationalistic tint, like people thinking that all languages come from turkish or something like that
like people thinking that all languages come from turkish
This is amazing, I fucking love this. People striving to create the lowest stakes possible conspiracy. I struggle to think of something that would have less impact on the world no matter it were true or false.
A shadowy cabal of powerful people guarding the secret of “actually, it was [rolls die] Turkish people who invented [rolls another die] language!”
then think again, because it was a part of continuing series: turkish nationalism
Okay sure, but this is comical. A Turkish nationalist will be a Turkish nationalist with or without this idea. It’s the equivalent of saying that Turkish people have naturally less odorous farts and thus TURKIYE SHALL RULE THE WORLD!
okay but this idea was kinda central to modern turkish nationalism. see, kurds are not distinct people, they just speak turkish but wrong (heard anything similar recently?) also this is part of the reason why standard turkish is actual common language in turkey
oh, it’s like russia’s idea of ukrainian and belarussian. fucking orphans of the empires…
