The big difference is that we understand chips: We know what kind of elements does an integrated circuit need (gates, registers) and we understand how each of t

The big difference is that we understand chips: We know what kind of elements does an integrated circuit need (gates, registers) and we understand how each of the low- and high-level and elements work. Reverse engineering in this case is puzzle reconstruction with very strong priors. On the other hand, we are truly clueless for brains: we do not know how "algorithms" are run in brains, if there are any simple computing units, how memory is stored ... All what we have are some guesses and statistics.