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I dont think he was competing. ANNs and boltzmann machines in the 80s seemed was an exploratory field not really part of statistical ML. At the time people were indeed competing with logic-based AI. SVMs came later and even then i believe, NNs had a different history and were not motivated from competition to SOTA techniques like SVMs. When the success of trainig came after the mid-2000s that's when ANNs started being called "ML". At least that's my memory

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Indeed, he wasn't competing. In fact, he wasn't moving; he kept doing what he had always been doing until, luckily, something, that he had nothing to do with, changed and allowed NN methods to work better. So I view him as essentially standing still, frozen in time, like a clock stuck at 6 o'clock. And, just like that clock, he would inevitably be correct (at least twice a day). He had nothing to do with the tools (higher memory & CPU speeds) that made his methods work, he just kept doing the same thing over and over until, one day, by accident, something important changed: his lab bought newer, faster computers.

He's not exactly Louis Pasteur is what I'm saying!

he s still the coinventor of boltzmann machines, and one who kept the field alive.

We call this "skating to where the puck is going to be".

I call it "doing the same thing over and over again, hoping someday you get lucky." I think there's a commonly-used expression for that behavior.

Hinton got lucky: something he had nothing to do with changed, making him look like a stoic hero.

A winning strategy or just a lazy path?

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