Hinton is only the second person to win both a Nobel and Turing. The first, Turing-winning political scientist Herbert Simon, started working on what he called “computer simulation of human cognition” in the 1950s and won the Nobel economics prize in 1978 for his study of organizational decision-making.

The Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded to three scientists today — two of whom are significant figures at Google DeepMind — for their work around proteins, which the Nobel Prize committee describes as the “chemical tools of life.”

For long periods of its history, artificial intelligence has lurked in the hinterland of science, often unloved and unfunded -- but two Nobel prizes in one week suggest its time