"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".
reply"Brute force" here is about the amount of data you're ingesting. It's no Alpha Zero, that will learn from scratch.
replyWhat? Either option requires sufficient data. Brute force implies iterating over all combinations until you find the best weights. Back-prop is an optimization technique.
reply