[wookietrader]

Yes you can.

Check out the publications by Ciresan on MNIST, have a look at Hinton's dropout paper or at the Kaggle competition that used deep nets. Or try it yourself and spend a descent amount of time on hyper parameter tuning. :)

[iskander]

Which of Ciresan's projects are you referring to? Everything I've seen by him uses convolutional layers of some sort.