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?