No, for instance you can perfectly describe the rules of Conway's Game of Life, and if you were an artificial intelligence living in the Game of Life you could presumably figure out the rules quite easily through experimentation. You wouldn't be able to prove those are the rules though, you'd have to make some assumptions that the rules didn't change in space and time, and that they weren't a manifestation of some more complex rules.
> you can perfectly describe the rules of Conway's Game of Life, and if you were an artificial intelligence living in the Game of Life you could presumably figure out the rules quite easily
I'm not so sure about this. It reminds me of the quote "If our brains were simple enough for us to understand them, we'd be so simple that we couldn't".
Conway's Game of Life is Turing complete, so if it is possible to build an artificial intelligence in a regular computer then it is possible to build one within the Game of Life. Also, understanding the basic rules of the game of life is not the same as understanding how an artificial intelligence within it functions. The rules that determine how patterns of pixels change in the game can be written down on a single sheet of paper, a description of an artificial intelligence built within the game would probably be absurdly complex.
