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No, is an optimization of something already existing. An innovation, but not a breakthrough per se.

Edit: this is an oversimplification

It could perhaps be said, then, that the Alpha series as a whole is a rolling breakthrough? Each new generation introduces changes that do not seem major compared to the ideas in the foundation of Deep Learning, but this actually allows to surpass state-of-the-art, improving performance on all relevant parameters (and not by a few percent). Dismissing these updates as technicalities is a dubious position.

Isn't that how all newer version of chess engines - including stockfish, improve?

Edit: https://github.com/glinscott/fishtest http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests

Prior to AZ, some competent people had doubts if self-taught NN could compete at all with a mature chess engine at its strongest setting. You know how that went. The improvement rate of subsequent Alpha revisions is incomparable to what software like chess engines shows. Hence, the tendency to evaluate each one as a breakthrough. Personally I believe that "breakthrough" is a non-technical word that's hard to define, but "improvement rate surpassing most optimistic expectations for a given field at a given time" could probably qualify as a criteria.

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