Two scientists have won the Nobel Prize in Physics for discoveries and inventions in the field of artificial intelligence capable of learning.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award this year's Nobel Prize in Physics to John Hopfield, Princeton University, USA, and Geoffrey Hinton, University of Toronto, Canada, for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.

The academy says the US-based Hopfield invented a network for saving and recreating patterns.

Canada-based Hinton used it to create something called the 'Boltzmann machine,' which can learn to recognize characteristic elements within a given type of data.

Both of them conducted important work with artificial neural networks from the 1980s onwards.

Their findings helped develop the building blocks for the kinds of machine learning used today, including in language translation and facial recognition.

Nobel winners in Physics are awarded about 1.1 million dollars for their work. On Wednesday, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences will unveil this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry.