Computing and the Nobels

Herb Simon

Herbert Simon while a political scientist in the 1940s at my institution, the Illinois Institute of Technology, developed the theory of bounded rationality, realizing that people did not always make the most rational decisions because of lack of information and limited cognitive ability. After Illinois Tech, Herb Simon moved to the Carnegie Institute of Technology and in the 1960s helped found its Computer Science Department, later the Carnegie-Mellon School of Computer Science. With his colleagues at Carnegie he applied his principles to artificial intelligence with Allen Newell and J. C. Shaw leading to an ACM Turing Award in 1975. Bounded rationality would help him win the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1978.

Computing would go on to play an important role in nearly all scientific research. Most notably in 2013, biochemists Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work using computers to model large molecules and simulate chemical reactions. Their entire research was done on computers, not in the lab. But no other computer scientist would win a Nobel Prize for the next 45 years. 

Demis Hassabis

That all changed last week. On Wednesday October 9th half of the Chemistry Nobel was awarded to computer scientists Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for the protein-folding prediction algorithm AlphaFold, which I consider the most impressive and game-changing application of machine learning. 

The day before John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton were awarded the Physics Nobel for the development of neural nets that led to AlphaFold, large-language models and so much more. Hinton with his 2018 Turing Award became only the second person, after Herb Simon, to win both prizes.

Is it physics? One podcast tried to answer this question.

Geoffrey HintonFirst of all, [Hopfield's] analogy to spin glasses is a use of a physical model. Certainly, information cannot exist in the absence of matter or energy. So ultimately, information science reduces to matter and energy as much as it reduces to mathematics. And thirdly, Nobel’s will was written in the 1890s. The first prize was awarded in 1901. Things have moved on since then. So the will prescribes physics, chemistry and physiology or medicine as the three science prizes and sometimes various Nobel committees are criticised for being a bit narrow. I think this shows. A certain creativity on the part of the academy to include a very up to date and very important field in physics by a little bit of creative accounting.

As a theorist who deals with information and computation, I disagree that these can only exist with matter and energy. The set of primes, for example, cannot fit into our finite universe.

But the third point is the most important. Nobel's will predates Turing and the development of computation as a new field. The importance of computing and artificial intelligence has take on such an importance that the Nobel Prize committees felt they needed to honor it, even if it means broadening the categories and encompassing computer science as a part of physics.

What does this mean for the Turing Award, now that computer scientists seem more eligible for Nobel prizes? I'll leave that as a open question for now.