Fig. 3. Performance of an EDNN tasked with learning the energy E operator for the 8 × 8 Ising model. Since E is semi-local (l = 1), f = c = 1 is an optimal configuration. Additional information in the form of a larger context region does not help the network predict values, and in fact makes the training more difficult, as the network must learn to ignore a significant amount of information. (a) Predicted vs. true energies (per spin) for optimal model. (b) Error (predicted – true energy) vs. true energy for optimal EDNN model.