[drvdevd]

I think this could only be done from an outside perspective for any given unit of time (meaning e.g. somehow monitoring the actual physical state of every atom of a modern system) and could only be performed by other machines.

I think we've reached a sort of "chicken and egg" point in computing history where we can only understand any given device with the help of other machines, though not necessarily with AI or Machine Learning.

Maybe that sounds obvious, given that VLSI tools have been around for a long time, but I think the point is that there is no such thing is as full knowledge in this realm and we are already totally dependent on our computing devices to understand our computing devices.

It's an interesting thought - how would one implement this? I think the closest thing that comes to mind so far is the DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge work, some of which is open source (https://github.com/mechaphish) and a good starting point at the software level anyway, where the question was similar in some ways: describe what's happening in this code path at time t, but also take it a step further and generate a patch to fix a bug(s).

[posterboy]

>I think this could only be done from an outside perspective

>only be performed by other machines

JTAG allows in-device debugging. Of course you need another machine, by some definition, to view the results or you would indefinitely apply recursion.