[agibsonccc]

I think a common example along the same vein is the analogies trick you always see. It's been demonstrated to death at this point but the great thing here is word2vec more or learns to predict the next word using hierarchical softmax so he's not technically "wrong" since this is the training objective. It's good to clarify it though.

[xigency]

Yes, and I guess that goes along with the black box idea. What function you are training for depends on your needs, and that can be achieved with deep learning or soft AI.