Years later, when asked to explain the Boltzmann Machine for the benefit of an ordinary person who knew little about math or science, Hinton declined to do so. This, he said, would be like Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist, explaining his work in quantum electrodynamics. When anyone asked Feynman to explain the work that won him the Nobel Prize in terms the layperson could understand,14 he, too, would decline. “If I could explain it to the average person,” he would say, “it wouldn’t have been worth the Nobel Prize.” The Boltzmann Machine was certainly hard to explain, in part
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