Hardware Issues

I'm sure these issues are relevant to SpiNNaker and I'm pretty sure they're relevant to BrainScales (particularly if you want to do agents).
Runtime I/O: the more spikes you can pump onto the boards and the more you can get from them, the better. It also helps if they're regular. We could also build better mechanisms on either side of this link to reduce the need for the communication, and to support reasonable behaviour when things are irregular. For instance, we could retain the last picture in the input neurons on the board.
Loadtime retention: it takes a long time to load reasonable sized topologies. It would be good if they or parts of them could be retained to reduce new load times.
Saving plastic synapses: if the agent runs for a long time (an hour) and learns that whole time, the learning is saved in plastic synapses. It would be good to retain that learning.
Runtime saving of plastic synapses (backing up in case of crash).
I don't think saving the current state of neurons is necessary (monkeys fall out of trees).
Generating new neurons and synapses at run time could help. Similarly, removing neurons and synapses would be useful.