How did a computer scientist such as Geoffrey Hinton manage to win a Nobel Prize in physics when computer science already has its own Nobel Prize equivalent in the Turing Awards?

You can have your cake and eat it too

"Good point, I'm sure we can swing it. And let's tack on Hopfield while we're about it."

Whatever.

Will you share your wife? Can she take both of us at the same time?

(Bob Dylan, Nobel Prize for Literature, 2016)

When he's standing, in front of you

^* Fibiger got the 1926 Medicine prize for the discovery of Spiroptera carcinoma (Don’t ask).

If sea levels were rising, wouldn't the acreage of coastal salt marshes increase? Are they?

A fly on the wall at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

Fortunately, we are privy to the discussion that led up to this:

My 11 million SEK, Dr Jo.

What life lesson did you learn the hard way?

… then anything is possible. There’s no rule that a Nobel Prize has to make sense.^*

^† They rationalise their decision thusly:

[Younger voice] "But wait a minute, Ising-Lenz goes back to the 1920's. And didn't Hinton plagiarise rather a lot? He also didn't invent modern backprop, did he, that's Linnainmaa? And Amari preceded Hopfield, too. That's not a good look."

What CIA front organizations operated in the United States during the 1960s?

Why wait any longer for the world to begin?

(Mumbles of assent)

"Where can we shoehorn it in? Chemistry is easy 'cos AlphaFold; but what about physics? A bit more challenging, right?"

Who is the most annoying character in the Office?

"Hey guys, AI is pretty big so let's centre our prizes on it this year. We can get some attention, and it's all about advertising, at the end of the day, isn't it?"

They then move on to selectively provide their own version of history. But hey, it’s OK. They wanted controversy, didn’t they? Whatever.

[Older voice] "Mmm. What about Hinton, he's widely regarded? Nobody got fired for buying IBM"

Shouldn’t there be a short porn platform like TikTok?

"Didn't he do something with Boltzmann in it? That sounds physics-y. RBMs and stuff, eh?"

Whatever.

Why wait any longer for the one you love?

Have you ever witnessed political correctness harm someone?

"Good idea, but how can we wangle something that says 'Physics'?"

In December 1973, when Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, comedian Tom Lehrer dropped his mic and stamped on it—satire had just died.

There you go.^†

Is it because Trump is impulsive that he is never on time?

In awarding prizes, the Nobel Committees often seem only marginally more competent than MTG is at explaining meteorology. And if they can give a literature prize for lyrics like:

[The basic structure of artificial neural networks] has close similarities with spin models in statistical physics applied to magnetism or alloy theory. This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics recognizes research exploiting this connection to make breakthrough methodological advances in the field of ANN.

"Naah, Linnainmaa is a Finn. Can't give it to a bloody Finnish mathematician. Let's go for drinks. Brännvin anyone?"

How do teachers justify punishing a student for fighting back against their bullies?