[Nobel Prize in physics 2024 : John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton. From Hopfield and Hinton to AlphaFold: The 2024 Nobel Prize honors the pioneers of deep learning].

Abstract

On October 8, 2024, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to John J. Hopfield, professor at Princeton University, and Geoffrey E. Hinton, professor at the University of Toronto, for their "fundamental discoveries that made possible machine learning through artificial neural networks." According to the Nobel committee, John Hopfield designed an associative memory capable of storing and reconstructing images, while Geoffrey Hinton developed a method enabling tasks such as identifying specific elements within images. This article retraces the career paths of these two researchers and highlights their pioneering contributions.