  The competitive MNIST handwritten digit recognition benchmark has a long
history of broken records since 1998. The most recent substantial improvement
by others dates back 7 years (error rate 0.4%) . Recently we were able to
significantly improve this result, using graphics cards to greatly speed up
training of simple but deep MLPs, which achieved 0.35%, outperforming all the
previous more complex methods. Here we report another substantial improvement:
0.31% obtained using a committee of MLPs.
