Can Neuroscience Understand Donkey Kong, Let Alone a Brain?

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." Last week, the duo uploaded their paper, titled "Could a neuroscientist understand a microprocessor?"