Darpa’s Simulated Cat Brain Project a ‘Scam’: Top Scientist

It's not just an ANN like you may have learned in school. They refer to their model as "single-compartment phenomenological spiking neurons, learning synapses with spike-timing dependent plasticity, and axonal delays" in their The cat is out of the bag article.

In simpler language, it's a spike-based model (when someone says "artificial neural network" they usually mean a rate-based model) where they adjust synaptic weights based on the correlations of spikes (Google: spike-timing dependent plasticity), and add a transmission delay before a spike arrives at the post-synaptic cell.

It sounds very much like the model described in Hebbian learning and spiking neurons (Gerstner et al., 1999).

This is a more sophisticated model than most neural network models, but it's still very much abstracted from biology. For starters, it doesn't sound like they model a diversity of neuron structures, nor even ion channels or dendrites.

This is where this "Blue Matter" project differs from the Blue Brain Project, which is attempting to model the biology is as fine detail as the science (and the computing hardware!) allows.

EDIT (forgot to get to the point):

Is it a scam? That's open to interpretation, but I agree with Dr. Markram that they are making fantastic claims and glossing over the fact that they are not modelling anything resembling a cat's brain except in neuron count.