6 points

Out of curiosity, are they using any of his underlying ML techniques to analyze imaging/other data collection before using it in actual physics models?

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10 points

Well, just about every data analysis technique ever invented has been applied in physics somewhere. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on applying a genetic algorithm to electron-atom scattering in particle detectors, a topic which I recall someone had already tried neural networks on.

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6 points

That’s what I’m wondering. It’s not wild to give him a prize in physics if his techniques led to advancement in physics.

“CS is applied math, not applied physics” like physics isn’t just applied math to model real world data is kind of weird, especially if his particular math actually got used in physics. That’s pretty much what calculus was.

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18 points

I don’t think that Donald Knuth deserves a physics prize for inventing TeX, even though TeX was a massive contribution to how we communicate physics.

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25 points

Repeating a comment I made in another forum here…


The Nobel organization is basically all about PR, and while as the nominating body they’re nominally independent, the Royal Academy of Science knows on which side their bread is buttered. Having a prize adjacent to AI in the year of our LLM 2024 is a no-brainer.

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17 points

Having a prize adjacent to AI in the year of our LLM 2024 is a no-brainer.

This works on multiple levels

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9 points

Hopfield is enormously influential, I don’t mind him getting a major prize at all. Physics seems weird tho.

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14 points

it’s happening omg. check back in five years

https://awful.systems/comment/3766257

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4 points

I understood some of those words

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11 points

From your linked post:

also from their pov the statistical approach to machine learning was defined by abandoning the attempt to externalize the meaning of text. the cliche they used to refer to this was “the meaning of a word is the context in which it occurs.”

Not an expert by any means, but this sounds like pagerank, but for language.

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8 points

To me it sounds like post-modernism.

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10 points
*

there’s a similarity in the sense that they’re both ‘content free.’ pagerank didn’t care about what was on your site, only what your page linked to and what pages linked to you

(past tense bc it’s unclear to me whether Google even uses pagerank at this point)

they diverge pretty significantly in one way: pagerank is an algorithm motivated by pragmatic simplifications. discarding the information of content when ranking sites is only something you would do because using content is really hard. you can take the statistical approach to semantics in the same spirit, but you don’t have to… ai true believers are necessarily treating the maxim I referred to as a philosophical claim, something that addresses the ground truth of what words are

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8 points

ai true believers are necessarily treating the maxim I referred to as a philosophical claim, something that addresses the ground truth of what words are

Thanks for breaking it down, I was missing this key bit!

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36 points

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.

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26 points

efficient move, getting the Nobel disease in before the Nobel itself

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31 points

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?

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27 points
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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

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23 points

Everybody knows that all languages derive from ULTRAFRENCH.

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18 points

You give me a word, any word, and I show you how the root of that word is Greek.

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12 points
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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!”

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14 points

I’m just waiting for him to chime in about music theory.

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19 points

A popular meme on social media makes a series of allegations about the musical tune pitch A=432Hz and A=440Hz, including that the latter was a standard imposed by the Nazis to manipulate their enemies.

spittake

Multiple experts told Reuters these allegations are unfounded.

NO WAY

Thanks Reuters.

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21 points

Hey mate, did you get your PhD or a fucking Nobel in linguistics by any chance?

Early onset Nobel disease.

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