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?

Whatever.

My 11 million SEK, Dr Jo.

Why wait any longer for the one you love?

What bait should you use for ocean fishing?

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

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

There you go.^†

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(Bob Dylan, Nobel Prize for Literature, 2016)

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

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

Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Sam Altman Announce the End of Smartphones — But Tim Cook Isn’t Playing Along - The Daily Galaxy

Fortunately, we are privy to the discussion that led up to this:

When he's standing, in front of you

[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."

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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?"

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

You can have your cake and eat it too

Scientists find a boulder weighing 2,645,547 pounds that was washed inland by an enormous tsunami - Earth.com

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.

Whatever.

They then move on to selectively provide their own version of history. But hey, it’s OK. They wanted controversy, didn’t they? Whatever.

Google reportedly plans to cut ties with Scale AI - TechCrunch

"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?"

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

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:

Gun owners, imagine if an attacker comes to your home and takes your gun to use against you before you had the chance to pick it up. Would you regret owning a gun?

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

(Mumbles of assent)

Why wait any longer for the world to begin?

Is there an ideal number of sessions in individual psychotherapy? Is there any point in continuing after reaching it?

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

^† They rationalise their decision thusly:

[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.

Why do men first look at a woman's chest instead of their face?