The Hamiltonian of Intelligence: From Spin Glasses to Neural Networks
On October 8, 2024, Hopfield and Hinton were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. The physics community reacted with irritation: is machine learning really physics? The irritation is wrong. The energy function of a Hopfield network is literally the Ising Hamiltonian. The lineage runs from Giorgio Parisi’s disordered iron alloys in 1979 to the model that predicted the structures of 200 million proteins.