[ggambetta]

"Brute force" would be trying random weights and keeping the best performing model. Backpropagation is compute-intensive but I wouldn't call it "brute force".

[Ygg2]

"Brute force" here is about the amount of data you're ingesting. It's no Alpha Zero, that will learn from scratch.

[jazzpush2]

What? Either option requires sufficient data. Brute force implies iterating over all combinations until you find the best weights. Back-prop is an optimization technique.