It always comes down to representation. If you can use a deterministic, efficient algorithm to represent the data in a more amenable manner, then the ML system

It always comes down to representation. If you can use a deterministic, efficient algorithm to represent the data in a more amenable manner, then the ML system will have a much easier time "making sense" of the patterns inherent in the data compared to a system that has to learn some abstract transformation from raw data to useful representations.