“The endeavor of science is to find the universals,” Isola said. “We could study the ways in which models are different or disagree, but that somehow has less explanatory power than identifying the commonalities.”

Other researchers argue that it’s more productive to focus on where models’ representations differ. Among them is Alexei Efros, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, who has been an adviser to three of the four members of the MIT team.

“They’re all good friends and they’re all very, very smart people,” Efros said. “I think they’re wrong, but that’s what science is about.”