MNIST is not a good dataset to show any artificial intelligence on. The dataset is so simple, a good programmer can probably write 100 lines of python to write

MNIST is not a good dataset to show any artificial intelligence on. The dataset is so simple, a good programmer can probably write 100 lines of python to write a classifier for it, based on no machine learning. Neural Network techniques which work so well in small, easy and trivial datasets like MNIST do not generalize to more serious datasets, and that's where the "and this is where the magic happens" component is needed.