system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Are most advancements in AI from better hardware or more advanced formulae?

Theoretically, a computer could brute force a problem to figure out every possible optimal solution, but that is absurdly infeasible in most instances, so systems use tricks such as classifiers and error minimization to get a "best guess." 

When new milestones such as Deepmind's recent victories are reached, is this more due to faster processors allowing for deeper/wider searches with existing algorithms, or have the algorithms themselves improved? (I'm sure it's a little of column A and a little of column B, buy I'm asking for a little more specific than that)
gpt
Most of today's computer science theories were created way before the creation of efficient computers. But ANNs (Artificial Neural Networks) only began to be a research topic in the 1960s.

The new powerful hardware allows the researchers to think of new algorithms that previously seemed ridiculously inefficient, so it's a bit of both. Without good hardware, no one would bother to do ANNs, and without new theories, no amount of hardware would produce these results.

Also note the impact of the Internet : many ANNs are trained using massive amounts of data (especially ANNs that use images), and most modeln data storage and manipulation algorithms were created in the wake of the creation of the Internet.