[mbauman]

The even bigger challenge is determining _what_ you need to observe in the first place.

As a simplistic analogy, evolutionary designs of FPGA boards can end up relying upon idiosyncratic properties of the board(s) and create circuits that "shouldn't work" based on an idealized electrical circuit model. And they may not be transferable to other boards. In other words, to "understand" some evolutionary FPGA circuits, you need to "observe" more than just the gate configurations and idealized schematic.

Brains are not FPGAs or even circuits, but I think the analogy holds. They're not _just_ idealized representations of spiking neural networks.

[NoxiousPluK]

I remember reading an article about this years ago - a non-transferable FPGA configuration which had some logic that should be unreachable but didn't work without it. Very faschinating but I've not been able to find it since.

[nick__m]

I think you want that paper "An Evolved Circuit, Intrinsic in Silicon, Entwined with Physics" available there https://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~cs4601/refs/papers/es97thompson...