2025-05-27 · About 25 minutes long tl;dr: I trained a neural network (NN), with logic gates in the place of activation functions, to learn a 3×3 kernel function for Conway’s Game of Life. I wanted to see if I could speed up inference by extracting the learned logic circuit from the NN. So, I wrote some code to extract and compile the extracted logic circuit to bit-parallel C (with some optimizations to remove gates that don’t contribute to the output). I benchmarked the original NN against the e...