Not a stupid question at all! Not exactly the same approach, but there's been some recent interesting research on neural net and ML driven global illumination:

Not a stupid question at all! Not exactly the same approach, but there's been some recent interesting research on neural net and ML driven global illumination: [0] http://www.jiapingwang.com/files/shadebot_sig13.pdf http://www.jiapingwang.com/files/shadebot_sig13.pdf [1] http://cgg.mff.cuni.cz/~jirka/papers/2014/olpm/On-lineLearningPPMinLTS.pdf http://cgg.mff.cuni.cz/~jirka/papers/2014/olpm/On-lineLearni...