Hacker News Reader

> Not necessarily. Everything points to the fact that the human brain (at least, I don't know much about ants) does not work in any way similar to neural networks, and as such there's no guarantee that you can represent its behaviour by the current algorithms.

Yes, the brain is most likely not simply modelling one giant ANN, but it's much more plausible that ANN-like components have a role in it.

If there is a space of optimal policies for the ant, then both the ANN and real neural systems will be attracted there. There are certainly a lot of local minima, but it would be surprising to me if ANNs and real neural systems could only find totally disjoint local minima with no similarities.

>and as such there's no guarantee that you can represent its behaviour by the current algorithms.

Doesn't the universal function approximation theorem provide just such a guarantee? It doesn't guarantee any algorithm will converge on that representation, but the capability to represent it is there.