Physicists have discovered what makes neural networks so extraordinarily powerful

Tegmark and Lin point out that whatever the reason, it is undoubtedly the result of a causal hierarchy. "A set of cosmological parameters (the density of dark matter, etc.) determines the power spectrum of density fluctuations in our universe, which in turn determines the pattern of cosmic microwave background radiation reaching us from our early universe, which gets combined with foreground radio noise from our galaxy to produce the frequency-dependent sky maps that are recorded by a satellite-based telescope," they say.