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.

The Nobel Prize in physics was awarded on Tuesday to scientists in the United States and Canada for their work in artificial intelligence that has become the foundation of powerful machine learning.

"The Nobel prize committee doesn't want to miss out on this AI stuff, so it's very creative of them to push Geoffrey through the physics route," she said. "I would argue both are