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 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded on Tuesday to scientists in the United States and Canada for their work in artificial intelligence that has become the foundation of powerful machine learning.

The Nobel Prize in literature has been awarded to the South Korean author Han Kang for what the Nobel committee called her “intense poetic prose.”