Two scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for training artificial neural networks and laying the foundations for today’s machine learning applications.

John J Hopfield and Geoffrey E Hinton will share the 11 million-krona award, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm said in a statement Tuesday.

Their work began in the 1980s, setting the stage for the current boom in artificial intelligence that was enabled by an explosion of computing power and massive troves of training data.

Hopfield created an associative memory that can store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns in data, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said. Hinton’s contribution was inventing a method that can autonomously find properties in data and so perform tasks such as identifying specific elements in pictures.

“I’m flabbergasted; I had no idea this would happen. I am very surprised,” Hinton, 76, told journalists gathered in Stockholm by phone. 

Hinton, who was born in London, is affiliated with the University of Toronto, Canada, while Chicago-born Hopfield, 91, is associated with Princeton University.

Among the most famous physics laureates are Albert Einstein in 1921 for services to theoretical physics and Marie Curie, together with her husband Pierre, for research on radiation in 1903. 

Annual prizes for achievements in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and peace were established in the will of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite, who died in 1896. A prize in economic sciences was added by Sweden’s central bank in 1968.

The laureates are announced through Oct 14 in Stockholm, with the exception of the peace prize, whose recipients are selected by the Norwegian Nobel Committee in Oslo.

  - Bloomberg