A life in context
The person behind the prize
Hopfield trained as a physicist and received his doctorate at Cornell. He brought ideas about collective behaviour in physical systems into the study of biology and computation. His career illustrates how a mathematical tool developed for one subject can become a new way of asking questions in another.
The contribution
His 1982 network stores patterns as stable states. Starting from an incomplete or damaged pattern, the network can settle into a stored one, rather as a ball rolls into a valley.
The idea in plain language
A neural network is a set of connected computational units. Its connections determine how information moves and what patterns the system can recognise. Hopfield showed how a network could store memories as stable collective states.
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