> we need to understand the mechanisms of neural networks at least an order of magnitude better than we currently do Many, many orders of magnitude more. I can

> we need to understand the mechanisms of neural networks at least an order of magnitude better than we currently do Many, many orders of magnitude more. I can't provide a link, but I read a while ago about this fascinating experiment: you put a few cardiac cells in a petri dish. They start crawling around. When they find each other they stick to each other, and after a small group forms, they start beating together. We think of biological neurons as little more than their ANN cousins. Take a few inputs from a few dendrites, apply a RELU or some other non-linear function to them, send the result through the axon. I think a better way to think of them is they are living things themselves, humongously complex. It's very unlikely they are as simple as we make them to be.