Another imperfect analogy: say someone (maybe from an earlier time) was looking to reverse engineer a modern CPU but could not see what was going on inside it v

Another imperfect analogy: say someone (maybe from an earlier time) was looking to reverse engineer a modern CPU but could not see what was going on inside it very well. Surely the whole thing would be very confusing. The CPU has many many clever designs based on the needs of people who buy it and use it, but the whole thing is based on how you can make AND/NOT using transistors. Maybe if the person was to discover this, then they could start getting past the complexity of reconstructing some of the mechanisms of the CPU; and they could start making their own CPU for their own needs.