I am an author of the two ANN algorithms. I STRONGLY beleive that at least one of Them is much better than bacpropagation.
First algorithm is bipropagation - much faster and more reliable than backpropagation.
Second algorithm is "border pairs method". It have many advantages over bacpropagation: it is 100% reliable, it is constructive, it is non iterative, it use only support vectors, it is very suitable for noise reduction,...
Both algorithms are described here on my RG page.