A British-Canadian computer scientist who has been dubbed the “godfather of artificial intelligence” has won this year’s Nobel Prize for Physics.
Professor Geoffrey Hinton, who works at the University of Toronto in Canada, shares the honour with Professor John Hopfield of Princeton University, for their discoveries and inventions that formed the building blocks of machine learning, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.
Speaking at the ceremony in Sweden, Prof Hinton said he was “flabbergasted”, adding: “I had no idea this would happen. I’m very surprised.”
Ellen Moons, a member of the Nobel committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said the pair “used fundamental concepts from statistical physics to design artificial neural networks that function as associative memories and find patterns in large data sets.”
She added such networks have “become part of our daily lives, for instance in facial recognition and language translation”.