Nobel Prizes in physics and chemistry awarded for machine learning research

The 2024 Nobel Prizes for physics and chemistry were announced on 8 and 9 October respectively. Both prizes were awarded for work enabling or using machine learning. More specifically, Hopfield is recognised for "inventing a network that uses a method for saving and recreating patterns". This Hopfield network utilises physics that describes a material's characteristics due to its atomic spin. The network as a whole is described in a manner equivalent to the energy in the spin system found in physics, and is trained by finding values for the connections between the nodes so that the saved images have low energy.