Conclusions
The nuts and bolts of the human brain remain one of the greatest mysteries in biology, and many aspects of its operation are little understood. From those aspects of the brain that we have a basic understanding of, some are hypothesized and not proven by experiments. An example of this would be the information processor metaphor used to describe the human brain which some scientists believe to be an incorrect description of this organ and claim that it is just another stepping stone towards a complete understanding of this masterpiece of nature. This matter has not stopped researchers from continually working on applying some of the lessons that the human brain can teach us in the design of computational machines.
TrueNorth is one of many attempts at creating an artificial brain capable of carrying out the same amount of computation it does by taking inspiration from the brain itself. TrueNorth was the first large-scale brain-inspired computational system that truly embodied some of the properties of the brain, such as vast parallelism, scalability, and low power consumption. Further investigations on this masterful piece of tech about its limitations and possible approaches to extend its capabilities are actively being pursued, which could very well result in novel brain-inspired hardware more advanced than anything we have now!
The emergence of theories offering explanations on how the brain ensures any of these properties can lead to significant development in computational system design and in return novel computation designs might shed some light onto how the brain works. It might not be long before we would see the first artificial brain competing with its organic counterpart!