What do you consider a real task? There are all sorts of small but important tasks that are unlikely to need a neural network to be large or have excessive amounts of data for it to do. If you can split a complicated task into a bunch of simple ones, but can’t actually solve it with the knowledge and approaches you have, you could have a task simple enough for generalized understanding via a neural network to be simple enough for this phenomenon to be obvious, couldn’t you? Yet it could then be composed with the networks for other tasks to get a valuable result. (This would perhaps allow rapid prototyping of things like programs by people who aren’t experts on the task, for instance.)
I don’t have any real examples at the moment, so I could be wrong. It might be interesting to test on a thing we do understand like sorting lists. This would have the advantage of being simple enough that you might even be able to pull of the trick of reverse engineering what algorithm is used too? Trivial to create the data too. The disadvantage would be that it probably wouldn’t lead anywhere useful in itself.
What do you consider a real task? There are all sorts of small but important tasks that are unlikely to need a neural network to be large or have excessive amounts of data for it to do. If you can split a complicated task into a bunch of simple ones, but can’t actually solve it with the knowledge and approaches you have, you could have a task simple enough for generalized understanding via a neural network to be simple enough for this phenomenon to be obvious, couldn’t you? Yet it could then be composed with the networks for other tasks to get a valuable result. (This would perhaps allow rapid prototyping of things like programs by people who aren’t experts on the task, for instance.)
I don’t have any real examples at the moment, so I could be wrong. It might be interesting to test on a thing we do understand like sorting lists. This would have the advantage of being simple enough that you might even be able to pull of the trick of reverse engineering what algorithm is used too? Trivial to create the data too. The disadvantage would be that it probably wouldn’t lead anywhere useful in itself.