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?

(Mumbles of assent)

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

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.

What happens if you listen to loud music while you sleep through earbuds every night (about 8 hours)? How will this affect your hearing? Will it decline fast?

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:

Why wait any longer for the world to begin?

You can have your cake and eat it too

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When he's standing, in front of you

Why wait any longer for the one you love?

^† They rationalise their decision thusly:

Why do so many people find Kakashi's character so appealing and inspirational?

Whatever.

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."

There's no way Republican Trump won all seven swing states. How was he able to cheat and steal the election?

[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.

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

(Bob Dylan, Nobel Prize for Literature, 2016)

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

Whatever.

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

Anyone think Andrew Tate can become prime minister of the UK with Elon Musk backing using X?

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

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

"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?"

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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.

My 11 million SEK, Dr Jo.

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

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

There you go.^†

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

MAGAs are becoming unhinged and violent about Musk being called the United States President. If MAGAs think Trump is the Commander in Chief, why aren’t MAGAs blaming Trump for what DOGE is doing to Americans?