I don't know if this is a travesty that they awarded the prize to work on non-physical systems to jump on a bandwagon or that there was nothing else obvious enough to the board in actual physics to give this to.
If I was the awardee I'd consider declining just out of respect to the field.
The linked document connects their work to physics as follows:
"The Hopfeld network utilises physics
that describes a material’s characteristics due to its
atomic spin – a property that makes each atom a tiny
magnet. The network as a whole is described in a
manner equivalent to the energy in the spin system
found in physics, and is trained by fnding values for
the connections between the nodes so that the saved
images have low energy"
"Hinton used tools from statistical physics, the science
of systems built from many similar components."
100% agreed as I can't think of any one individual since(1) who has done as much for all of science and engineering as he ultimately did; alas, they are not awarded posthumously.
(1) Newton would be a strong contender on a "for all time" basis, but even he would've probably needed to share it with Leibniz, which would have driven him absolutely ~b o n k e r s~, like wet hornet in a hot outhouse mad, LOL.
If I was the awardee I'd consider declining just out of respect to the field.