[placebo]

> Well, it doesn't create any information that wasn't in the original data (nothing can do that, you can only lose information in processing)

I'm not sure this is correct. In a sense, it does contain information that wasn't in the original inputs - i.e information added by the weights in the neural network which itself was obtained by information extracted from an enormous amount of previous samples. Of course, the largest and best trained neural network won't be able to tell the license number given 2 pixels of information, but I am curious as to the theoretical limits of what can be achieved in extreme cases of with very little information as input and a neural network that has almost limitless resources.