Just watched the nobel prize live stream, surprised by the topic, looks very engineering to me rather than physics, do algorithms make physics subsidiary?
The original wording explicitly mentions "discovery or invention within the field of physics", so that wording has been reflected in some of the prices over the years.
Also, it's a price based on a will from over 100 years ago, managed by a private institution. The institution can be as arbitrary as it wants. They don't need to answer to anyone.
Well in 1912, the physics prize went to a guy who designed a better light for light houses and buoys to prevent shipwrecks! Actually, most early Nobels went to practical things.
I am really surprised. I would have guessed that a Nobel Prize would be awarded to advancements in the field itself. Not for inspirations from it or to tools that led to advancements. Although as I write this I'm sure there have been several prizes awarded to scientists / engineers who have developed tools to advance physics. Like radio astronomy? Still surprised though.
Some other recent cases of the prize being given to an engineering contribution:
- 2018 was for chirped pulse amplification, which is most commonly used in medicine (LASIK surgery for example)
- 2014 was for basically for LED lights
- 2010 was for a method for producing graphene
- 2009 was for both charge-coupled device, which is a component for digital imaging (including regular consumer digital cameras), and fibre-optic cables
Well yeah, so are neural nets. I just meant that these are engineering accomplishments, not scientific per se. Of course experimental science will often take advantage of cutting edge technology, including from computer science.
NNs have absolutely revolutionized systems biology (itself a John Hopfield joint, and the AlphaFold team are reasonably likely to get a Nobel for medicine and physiology, possibly as soon as 'this year') and are becoming relevant in all kinds of weird parts of solid-state physics (trained functionals for DFT, eg https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-64619-8).
The idea that academic disciplines are in any way isolated from each other is nonsense. Machine learning is computer science; it's also information theory; that means it's thermodynamics, which means it's physics. (Or, rather, it can be understood properly through all of these lenses).
John Hopfield himself has written about this; he views his work as physics because _it is performed from the viewpoint of a physicist_. Disciplines are subjective, not objective, phenomena.
My personal theory is that Demis and John will win the Chemistry prize for AlphaFold this year and that they decided to also award this one to help bolster the idea that ML is making fundamental improvements in academic science.
I would prefer if there was an actual Nobel Prize for Mathematics (not sure if the Fields would become that, or a new prize created).
I did have a similar thought, but awarding a prize to AF this year would be a very bold move, given how things went today. Right folks, we've demoralized all the physicists today, tomorrow we can do the same for the chemists!
To be perfectly honest, I'm not really sure the physics community being demoralized by this prize award is a really negative thing. I think many aspects of HEP and other areas have stagnated, requiring exponentially more money for marginal gains (I don't have a problem with LIGO or other large projects, but "we found another high energy particle consistent with the standard models" not so much). Perhaps this prize will give the community a shot in the arm to move away from "safe but boring".
i reason it from the perspective that its because they've found a way to make a machine out of bits that no one's ever made before, they're physical objects
"it will be backed by a collection of low-volatility assets, such as bank deposits and short-term government securities in currencies from stable and reputable central banks." from the whitepaper: https://libra.org/en-US/white-paper/#the-libra-currency-and-...
It's like one to one copy of the traditional monetary system with speed of transactions improved. Low volatile assets they rely on are not real and therefore not guaranteed to stay low volatile. It may be decentralized technically but not socially or ethically.
"it will be backed by a collection of low-volatility assets, such as bank deposits and short-term government securities in currencies from stable and reputable central banks." from the whitepaper: https://libra.org/en-US/white-paper/#the-libra-currency-and-...
It's like one to one copy of the traditional monetary system with speed of transactions improved. The volatility of low-volatile assets still contradictive in the long term (I mean just ~5 years) So I don't see any innovative approach in the terms of social order and decentralization.
Your tone is too cynical, this is exactly what it is and what payment processors have been dreaming of for years. A banking system where money can be moved instantly without weird batching, holidays, manual intervention, and all the rest of the legacy crap that plagues current banking.
How will this liberate control from governments? Libra will still be pegged to government controlled currencies, libra is just a proxy for transportation. Governments can still regulate transactions that cross borders, the same laws will apply and will actually be easier to enforce because the libra network is managed by legal corporations rather than an anonymous pool of users.
> That's just part of the bootstrapping process, to avoid volatility in the short-term.
How would you stop pegging libra to a currency without destroying or distorting enormous values of libra that existing owners have and therefore permanently destroying trust in libra? I don't see any real substance to this sort of vague cynical claim that "they're just biding their time".
> And how do you suggest they'll do that?
By applying the same transaction reporting laws to libra (which have equivalent currency value) that already apply to bank-to-bank transactions. The key validators in libra transactions are legal corporations unambiguously within government jurisdiction.
I also can use it for buying a coffee or sending payments across border directly and I appreciate already the developers and managers behind it but people die and suffer for the sake of "low volatile assets" for years. Speed or functionality may be problematic previously but we have much deeper and important problems which can only be solved by contributions of companies like Facebook. That's why I'm uttering this here.
So it sounds like Libra coins will be minted at a previously agreed-upon exchange rate by one of the consortium companies proving that they have bought one of these low-volatility financial assets. It does not sound like there will be any "mining" and the decentralization will be, for the time, in just a handful of large companies.
Can someone validate that I'm understanding that correctly?
If so, I'd agree with previous commenters that we're not looking at anything which can shift the power structure of monetary policy but improvements in transaction speed and cost could have some real social benefits - especially in the developing world.
Would like to add a practice that may be helpful for someone: I store an uploaded image as an array of objects in the DB. Each object contains format (jpeg, webp, etc.), name, size, hash and other pieces of information about the transformed image. Frontend app chooses which one to render according to a browser (use webp in Chrome for example.) and UI element.
Egyptian funerary practice is pretty formulaic. A quick glance at the inscriptions, and I spot some traditional offering formulae. Here's a translation from the register on the right in the picture with the label beginning 'Priests were important people':
"An offering the king gives to Osiris, foremost of the westerners, lord of Djedu, a voice offering [of bread and beer] for him at every festival and every day..."
and then it cuts off. I'd expect the inscription to continue stating that these offerings are for the spirit of the tomb's owner, along with a list of some of his offices. I spot similar offerings to Anubis. I spot the epithet "venerable", indicating that the tomb owner had a funerary cult.
Regarding the meaning of objects found I want to share this humorous story in which future archaeologists find a motel room and they believe to have found a great tomb similar to that of Tutankhamun:
haha, great example :) I generally think in the way the story points to. the reason we tend to give sacred meanings to ancient findings is because of our search for the meaning of life, I think. Finding details about their daily life would be more interesting and useful, however.
