The award this week of Nobel prizes in chemistry and physics to a small number of artificial intelligence pioneers affiliated with Google has stirred debate over the company's research dominance and how breakthroughs in computer science ought to be recognised.

The list of Nobel laureates reads like a collection of humanity’s greatest treasures: Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Francis Crick, Toni Morrison. As of this morning, it also includes two physicists whose research, in the 1980s, laid the foundations for modern artificial intelligence.

John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton shared the award for their work on artificial neural networks and machine learning