Thanks, not familiar with QM at all, but it seems to me from glancing through one of the papers that the neural network is used to replace a popular way of representing the wave function which itself is an Ansatz. Not very convincing, but of course, as I said not familiar with the background and so I may be overlooking something.
that's exactly it -- they take an existing form for the ansatz (or the general idea of it, at least), and make it more flexible by replacing pieces with neural networks that have many more parameters, while maintaining constraints required by physics. I think this will become very common in the future.
That maybe true but what I was looking for is a more convincing way of showing that a neural network approximates a function better than other functions, such as say a b-spline. For example, you say that the neural network with many more parameters works better, but what if we had a b-spline with many more nodes.