I was just listening to that podcast yesterday and loved the way he presented this information. I know next to nothing about NNs but I could pretty much follow everything that he said (from an intuitive sense, anyway, if not a technical one).<p>This &quot;magic&quot; of converging networks reminds me of how ensemble methods, such as random forests, are effective but people aren&#x27;t sure why. There&#x27;s certainly (AFAIK) no theoretical grounds to say that a bunch of random decision trees should yield universally good results.