I don&#x27;t think this has been tried. What would be the heuristic for removing connections&#x2F;nodes? It does seem to me, though, that the heuristic should be &quot;learn from the data using backprop&quot; and that you&#x27;re essentially calling for L1 regularization (which encourages sparsity), or L2 regularization (which encourages small weights), which are already pretty standard in machine learning.