Say we found an artifact or piece of technology that wasnt created by humans. How would we go about reverse engineering it? How do technology companies reverse engineer competitors ideas?
In: Engineering
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By disassembling it, sometimes even down to the microscopic level, analyzing how it works then replicating it. Not really all that different from watching craft videos on youtube to get ideas, except elevated to a much higher level.
Humans have figured out alot of efficient designs for simple problems a long time ago. A complex machine/design is *usually* a combination or a puzzle of various simple designs already understood by most designers but modified or combined in novel ways. You may already know how a similar object works, and you just look for how this object works differently and why, is it better? Cheaper? Unique supply design challenges?
Start with what you know about the thing. If it’s a rival computer chip design you already know a *lot* about it. What it does, how it works, most of what’s inside of it. This makes things relatively easy. You may analyze the chemicals in it, you may study the shape of the leads in the chip with some sort of scanning machine like an x-ray or a microscope.
If it’s a random object you found on an alien spaceship then you know almost nothing about it. Is it even made of earthly materials? What is its purpose? If you can’t answer questions like this you’ll never be able to reverse engineer it, the best you can do is poke around until you stumble across something.
Voice from the past: In the late 80’s Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) released its 3rd major CPU chip, the CVAX. It was a CMOS version of an earlier MOS VAX (32 bit CPU) chip.
We knew that Russia was into reverse engineering DEC chips so, on the top layer of metalization this was printed : “CVAX, for those that care enough to steal the very best” which was also written in cyrillic.
They’re different ways to reverse engineer things depending on what kind of things you’re talking about. I reverse engineer data files by looking at the file using the program that’s meant to use it, making note of the fields that seem to be in the file, using a binary editor to look for those fields, and then trying to figure out what the remaining data in the file means.
Similarly, reverse engineering a software program involves using the software, coming up with a few candidate designs for how you’d structure the software, and looking at the binary code to see if you can match pieces of your candidate designs to the actual binary. It’s necessary to be familiar with the assembly language / machine language of the processor as well as the structure of the binaries generated by various popular compilers.
You’d be really hampered trying to reverse engineer alien tech because you don’t know the basics of the technology nor, I’m assuming here, would you know what the tech is supposed to do.
I think basically you treat it like a black box where you feed inputs and see the outputs to get an idea of what it does. Then also try to look at the components at a macro or micro scale.
With human tech though, an expert in that field can probably learn a lot just by looking at the components. Especially something like a circuit board where most everyone uses the same basic components.
The objective is to learn how the thing works so that it can be 1) copied, 2) copied and improved, 3) use aspects of its technology, or 4) find vulnerabilities. How, depends on what it is. A computer chip might be x-rayed; a car disassembled and its parts carefully measured; software might be dumped from a chip, to figure out what it does. There’s no right way, but there are better ways. Corporate espionage is very real, and many companies take counter-espionage steps to protect their competitive advantage, etc.
There are some things that are going to be common just because of the physics of things… Although just because we can figure out WHAT it is doing does not mean we can replicate it. There may be materials that we do not have the processes to make, although knowing something is possible is half the battle.
Also, a complex piece of equipment would take longer to figure out. Let’s say we found a functioning tricorder, I am sure we could figure out the sensor inputs, probably figure out how to decode the output. But let’s say they figured out how to tap into “zero point energy” using a contained micro black hole for the power source. Well I think that even though we figured out what they are doing, we would still need to figure out how to generate the micro black hole in the first place. That might require a total rethink of current physics research. It might require a whole new take on material construction. And so it goes.
ELI5:
1. Start with what it does or what you think it’s made out of.
2. Teardowns and tests – you can bounce your theories off what your team finds when they take apart a widget.
3. You can describe what the widget or lines of code do to your team and then have them work on doing something similar – [This is “clean room design” (wikipedia link).](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design). That’s how the BIOS (basic system that controls a computer) was reverse engineered by a computer firm. One team described what each section of code did and another team attempted to do just that on their own. Legally they didn’t copy the trademarked code – they got the same results another way.
4. There’s just flat out copying what was done – the Soviet era Tu-4 “Bull” bomber was copied from American B-29 bombers stranded in Russia during WWII. Tu-4’s were built that were complete copies – down to the temporary wartime repairs done on American B-29’s.
There’s a limit to how well reverse engineering can work.
I remember the TV show NOVA on PBS in the 1980’s – Back in the day, on one episode of NOVA, they showed some Soviet (Yes I am old) scientists who had gotten their hands on a Japanese industrial robot.
They had reverse engineered it’s programing and operating systems to the point where it could do whatever they wanted – but they couldn’t make one because of the accuracy and fine tolerances of it’s motors. The 1980’s era Soviet milling and machining technology wasn’t up to making motors with the accuracy and tolerances done in Japan.
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