NVIDIA NIPS paper doing just that for NN.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;papers.nips.cc&#x2F;paper&#x2F;5784-learning-both-weights-and-connections-for-efficient-neural-network.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;papers.nips.cc&#x2F;paper&#x2F;5784-learning-both-weights-and-c...</a><p>Not sure if it tells us more about <i>why</i> the network works, but they sure as heck get rid of a lot of connections.