Connectionism is thus a bit like the flying-machine inventions of Leonardo da Vinci—they were prescient ideas, but not workable until lighter and stronger materials could be developed.[29] Once the hardware caught up, vast connectionism, such as one-hundred-layer networks, became feasible. As a result, such systems were able to solve problems that had never been tackled before. This is the paradigm driving all the most spectacular advances of the past several years.
