Vowpal Wabbit on MNIST

Running vowpal wabbit on the digit recognition challenge of kaggle with a 1-100 passes and logistic loss gives 88-90%. Using quadratic and cubic features appears to give no improvement. There was thread on kaggle saying 1000 passes and quadratic features gives 97%, so I'll being checking that out later. I'll also be trying lda from vw and seeing if that gives improvements.