It really depends on what level of abstraction you care to simulate.
The article starts out "At the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, a large-scale effort is underway to understand how the 86 billion neurons in the human brain are connected. The aim is to produce a map of all the connections: the connectome. Scientists at the Institute are now reconstructing one cubic millimeter of a mouse brain, the most complex ever reconstructed."
So the article is about starting with the wiring diagram and working up. My point is that, even where we already have the wiring diagram for an biological neural system, simulating what it does is just barely starting to work.
The article starts out "At the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, a large-scale effort is underway to understand how the 86 billion neurons in the human brain are connected. The aim is to produce a map of all the connections: the connectome. Scientists at the Institute are now reconstructing one cubic millimeter of a mouse brain, the most complex ever reconstructed."
So the article is about starting with the wiring diagram and working up. My point is that, even where we already have the wiring diagram for an biological neural system, simulating what it does is just barely starting to work.