Thanks for your comments @sunguralikaan. I’d rather not have this thread taken over with discussion of paCLA, so let’s continue on the discussion page for the paper.
Just to quickly answer on plausibility: it’s more a case of asking where the sources for the SP-TM separation can be found (nobody in Numenta claims these exist). Pyramidal cells in cortex receive both proximal and distal depolarising inputs every time they become active, so making them active without including distal inputs is biologically incorrect. Jeff and Numenta concede this but expect evidence that it is worth making such a big change to NuPIC. The engineering difference is marginal at best in the experiments we’ve done, but paCLA in my view corrects an important theoretical weakness in standard HTM.