If you look at the learned gates, it does not directly extract the underlying rules of Conway's game of life. It has many more gates than are necessary and they

If you look at the learned gates, it does not directly extract the underlying rules of Conway's game of life. It has many more gates than are necessary and they have the same complex, uninterpretable structure you see in a neural network. The training method they're using is the same as used for quantized neural networks. Your 'neurons' being logic gates doesn't mean you're doing logic, it's still statistics.