It may come as a surprise, but this phenomenon of "uninterpretable" circuits designed by algorithms is 30 years old now.
Adrian Thompson's research in the 90s evolved FPGAs that did signal analysis with bizarre features:
- A tiny number of cells (far fewer than expected)
- No clock, despite performing signal analysis
- FPGA cells that were logically disconnected, but when removed caused the device to stop working
Even then their approach was taking advantage of the physics in the FPGA. One can only imagine how effective this could be when applied to circuit design with the compute budget of a frontier lab.
https://cacm.acm.org/research/analysis-of-unconventional-evo...
Those "evolved" FPGAs weren't much of a mystery. They just used undefined parameters (inductive coupling, power supply rail glitching, etc) to achieved the trained outputs. They didn't work when the ambient temperature changed, or when moved to another example of the same FPGA.
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