There are pruning methods which try to find and remove connections and neurons that don't have much effect on the network, essentially simplifying it. There ar

There are pruning methods which try to find and remove connections and neurons that don't have much effect on the network, essentially simplifying it. There are also some methods such as HyperNeat which try to find simple structures that can be expanded into a much larger neural network. By sharing weights and having sections of the network that repeated many times.