Abstract: The Nobel Prize in Physics for 2024 was awarded to Geoffrey Hinton and John Hopfield for their transformative contributions to the field of machine learning and artificial neural networks. We will explore John Hopfield’s development of the Hopfield network, which introduced a new paradigm for associative memory and pattern recognition. And then examine Geoffrey Hinton’s contributions, including the Boltzmann machine and the backpropagation algorithm, which revolutionized the training of deep neural networks. Their research laid the foundation for modern AI technologies, driving significant advancements in fields such as image and speech recognition, healthcare, and autonomous systems. Time permitting, we will briefly consider the question – Can machines mimic human intelligence?