Can you provide an example of this? There are a few inventions-via-serendipity (e.g. Teflon) where someone got lucky, but few that i can think of where the specific person who got lucky mattered. Kary Mullis and PCR maybe?
AlexNet that started the deep learning revolution. Was there other groups trying to solve Image Net by training convnets on GPU’s in 2009?
OpenAI and the scaling hypothesis. Before chatGPT it was only OpenAI training larger and larger language models.
TRPO, PPO line of RL algorithms invented by John Schulman
In fact I would say, in general a lot of inventions only happen because 1 person or 1 group willed it into existence and it would seem very unlikely for it to happen if that 1 person or group did not exist.
Do you happen to still have the homework questions/solutions somewhere ?
At the moment the new ones are locked behind CMU credentials.
I don’t have any of the code for the solutions.
Bicycles do not need precision bearings nor pneumatic tires, as proven by the fact that bicycles predate them by decades. Also radial style ball bearings were invented for bicycles. Bicycles were the catalyst for precision bearings, not the other way around. Similarly pneumatic tires were created for tricycles (long after pedal bicycles were already invented)
Yes we absolutely could have had 2 wheeled transportation centuries earlier. Roads, the actually necessary infrastructure, was long since a thing for carts and wagons.