No, not all inventions are incremental improvements of existing techniques. Backpropagation and convolutional nets, for example. Now, you might counter with the fact that it's just the chain rule (and convolution existed before that), but the point is it that algorithm had never been used in machine learning before.
People have used neural nets as function approximators for reinforcement learning with MCTS for game playing well before AlphaGo (!!).
Your lightbulb example actually supports my point. The lightbulb was the product of more than a half-century of work by hundreds of engineers/scientists. I have no problem with pointing to 70 years of work as a breakthrough invention.
People have used neural nets as function approximators for reinforcement learning with MCTS for game playing well before AlphaGo (!!).
Your lightbulb example actually supports my point. The lightbulb was the product of more than a half-century of work by hundreds of engineers/scientists. I have no problem with pointing to 70 years of work as a breakthrough invention.