ResNet, AlexNet, VGG, Inception: Understanding various architectures of Convolutional Networks

Convolutional neural networks are fantastic for visual recognition tasks. Good ConvNets are beasts with millions of parameters and many hidden layers. In fact, a bad rule of thumb is: 'higher the number of hidden layers, better the network'. AlexNet, VGG, Inception, ResNet are some of the popular networks. Why do these networks work so well?