The Sherrington–Kirkpatrick model of spin glass is a Hopfield network with random initialization.
Boltzmann machine is Sherrington–Kirkpatrick model with external field.
This is price in physics given to novel use of stochastic spin-glass modelling. Unexpected, but saying this is not physics is not correct.
There is so much more than fundamental physics and there is much more in physics than breakthrough discoveries. Medical physics just to name a fun field everybody always forgets about has been studying and using neural networks since about forty years. Applied physics, biophysics, atmospheric physics. Even particle physics is mostly data science these days.
This idea that physics should only be about fundamental theories and discoveries is really detrimental to the field and leads to the false idea of stagnation that permeates this whole thread.
However, it is weird for the committee to give a prize for theoretical physics without an experiment. It is doubly weird when they already made this "mistake" in 2021 with Parisi, who was the odd one out among the geophysicists, and are giving another prize in spin glass/stat phys... why?
Why David Sherrington and Scott Kirkpatrick did not share the price for the Sherrington–Kirkpatrick model? Hopfield is referencing their work?
Multiple theoretical physicists working with black holes (Hawkin's and others) didn't get Nobel, because black holes were not confirmed or theory could not be tested.
It's mathematical/CS work. The connection to actual physical laws or phenomena is even more tenuous than the prize for exoplanets a few years ago.
The Nobel prize physics committee has made itself a joke, and probably destroyed the credibility of the prize.
Neural networks are used in tons of data pipelines for physics experiments, most notably with particle accelerators.
The Nobel Prize is also occasionally awarded to engineers who develop tools that are important parts of experiments. 2018 for example was awarded for chirped pulse amplification, which is probably best known for being used in LASIK eye surgery, but it is also used in experimental pipelines.
With this argument you could even say Bill Gates should get an award for inventing Windows and popularized the desktop computer... Or at least Linus Torvalds since those pipelines are probably running Linux...
From now on I'll always see it as just another nobel peace prize.
This is beyond ridiculous.