I think you could use a NN to attempt to replicate the circuit under test, perhaps generating verilog, programming a chip and then running it against a set of autogenerated test vectors.
A generalized system for duplicating the functionality of a boolean circuit. If can use its own axioms and generalities, once it "understands" flip-flops and nand gates, can start to directly synthesize more complex logic.
That sounds like a great idea, but you today we can't even synthesize arbitrary VHDL/Verilog code efficiently. The author needs an understanding of hardware architecture to write something that synthesizes versus just a test harness not intended to be synthesized.
A generalized system for duplicating the functionality of a boolean circuit. If can use its own axioms and generalities, once it "understands" flip-flops and nand gates, can start to directly synthesize more complex logic.