philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Neuroscience Can’t Explain How an Atari chip Works

The researchers wanted to see how accurately their software could describe its activity. Their idea: have the chip run different games—including Donkey Kong, Space Invaders, and Pitfall, which have already been mastered by some AIs—and capture the behavior of every single transistor as it did so (creating about 1.5 GB per second of data in the process). Then they would turn their analytical tools loose on the data to see if they could explain how the microchip actually works.

For instance, they used algorithms that could probe the structure of the chip—essentially the electronic equivalent of a connectome of the brain—to establish the function of each area. While the analysis could determine that different transistors played different roles, the researchers write in PLOS Computational Biology, the results “still cannot get anywhere near an understanding of the way the processor really works.”

It’s worth noting that chips and brains are rather different: synapses work differently from logic gates, for instance, and the brain doesn’t distinguish between software and hardware like a computer. Still, the results do, according to the researchers, highlight some considerations for establishing brain understanding from huge, detailed data sets.

See the full story here: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603362/neuroscience-cant-explain-how-an-atari-works/?utm_source=MIT+TR+Newsletters&utm_campaign=b1d4b8bc6a-The_Download&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_997ed6f472-b1d4b8bc6a-153894145