The 2024 Nobel Prize for Physics was shared by John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton. This paper is the text of the address given in conjunction with the award.

This review traces how ideas from statistical physics evolved into foundational models of neural computation, shaping modern AI and culminating in the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Motivated by recent observations that mutation rates can be correlated with individual fitness, we analyze an evolutionary hill-climbing model with fitness-dependent mutation rates. Our results show t...