Maybe I'm missing something, but from the paper https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/FFA13.pdf , they use non-conv nets on CIFAR-10 for back prop, resulting in 63% accuracy. And FF achieves 59% accuracy (at best). Those are relatively close figures, but good accuracy on CIFAR-10 is 99%+ and getting ~94% is trivial. So, if an improper architecture for a problem is used and the accuracy is poor, how compelling is using a…
Until the brain's algorithm is "solved", half steps are important. We need as many alternate half steps as we can find until one or more lead to a better understanding of the brain. (And potentially, better than backdrop efficiency or results.)