> There are a limited number of ways to put ink on a page, but the 'rest of the owl' meme is all about how there's a lot more to it than that. I'm not convince

> There are a limited number of ways to put ink on a page, but the 'rest of the owl' meme is all about how there's a lot more to it than that. I'm not convinced. If you want to stick to the analogy, ML research looks like being able to draw a bunch of different animal parts and trying out different configurations of them; then once the drawing is done, you check whether you got close to an owl. That's what I meant when I said that there's little underlying theory to motivate the decisions that are being made (apart from the resulting performance of course).