Two scientists credited with laying the “foundation of today’s powerful machine learning,” University of Toronto professor emeritus Geoffrey Hinton and Princeton University professor John Hopfield, were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics today.

Until this year, the Nobel Prize for physics has typically gone to pioneers in that field, like last year’s winners who used lasers to make breakthrough discoveries about the electron. But 2024 is the year of artificial intelligence, and apparently the hype has reached even the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Similar flexibility, though in an area with far more profound consequences than ethology, has been demonstrated with regard to this year’s physics prize. Showing a sense of timeliness not always apparent in its deliberations,