Geoffrey Hinton, the British Canadian computer scientist whose machine learning discoveries have proved so profound he’s known as the “godfather of AI,” has won the Nobel Prize in physics.
The honour was bestowed Tuesday on Hinton, 76, and Princeton University researcher John Hopfield, 91, by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. It chose to award the pair because their use of physics had uncovered patterns in information that laid the foundation for machine learning and neural networks.