John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton shared the award for their work on artificial neural networks and machine learning

The list of Nobel laureates reads like a collection of humanity’s greatest treasures: Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Francis Crick, Toni Morrison. As of this morning, it also includes two physicists whose research, in the 1980s, laid the foundations for modern artificial intelligence.

John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton have been awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for discoveries and inventions that formed the building blocks of machine learning.