Eric Jonas and Konrad Kording wondered, what would happen if they studied the chip in the style of neuroscientists? How would the approaches that are being used to study the complex squishy brain fare when used on a far simpler artificial processor? Could they re-discover everything we know about its transistors and logic gates, about how they process information and run simple video games? Forget attention, emotion, learning, memory, and creativity; using the techniques of neuroscience, could Jonas and Kording comprehend Donkey Kong?

No. They couldn’t. Not even close.

Even though the duo knew everything about the chip—the state of each transistor and the voltage along every wire—their inferences were trivial at best and seriously misleading at worst. “Most of my friends assumed that we’d pull out some insights about how the processor works,” says Jonas. “But what we extracted was so incredibly superficial. We saw that the processor has a clock and it sometimes reads and writes to memory. Awesome, but in the real world, this would be a millions-of-dollars data set.”

Source: Can a Neuroscientist Understand Donkey Kong, Let Alone a Brain? – The Atlantic