I don't think that's true particularly in this case. This paper is pointing out that you can encode a structural prior in a CNN - but knowing the "great old te

I don't think that's true particularly in this case. This paper is pointing out that you can encode a structural prior in a CNN - but knowing the "great old techniques" will help you design the right network architecture to do that. SVMs were a surprise when they came out, no so much a generalization as a challenge (at least at first)