A lot of AI "milestones" were actually caused by improvements in computing itself, IMO. That is, they weren't facilitated by novel algorithms or engineering sol

A lot of AI "milestones" were actually caused by improvements in computing itself, IMO. That is, they weren't facilitated by novel algorithms or engineering solutions specific to the milestone itself. They kind of just happened, either because computers got faster (e.g. disk I/O, ram size, processor speeds and caching) or because someone finally decided to throw enough distributed computation at the problem. People knew about the main algorithms that Deep Blue used (alpha-beta minimax with heuristic evaluation) for decades before Deep Blue existed. It was simply a matter of waiting until IBM found marketing value in dedicating a top 300 world super computer to beating Gary Kasparov