if aliens had come down and given us laptops, rather we invented digital machines, then likewise i'd be talking about the relevant materials science, physics etc.

reverse engineering a laptop to figure out how it works would require extremely little computer science, and 'only at the end'

the reason digital computers are interesting and useful is that they route electricity around devices which are designed to be responsive to one another. the patterns of activation, as managed by the CPU, are weakly describable by abstract algorithms like sorting

starting with a laptop, and no further information, we'd be 100(s)+ years of research away from needing to understand that CPUs were implementing a sorting algorithm

and importantly, that it is doing so has almost nothing to do with the value of the device -- which lies in its ability to provide 'dynamical power and modulation of operation' using electricity

we're in the same situation with animals and people think that, what, understanding gradient descent or backprop is helpful? this is just some csci bs