I see where you are coming from, especially in the long run. Although I am having a hard time imagining an actual use case that would be practical for the current ability of HTM. Can you describe a case where learning repeated inputs is actually useful? On top of my head, if I give the agent positive reward with a delay when it encounters a specific pattern, I guess learning a repeated sequence would help. Because it would be seeing the same thing over and over and the reward would come for example at the 5th same input. But I am not sure if this is a practical case or central ability considering the complexities and implications it introduces onto the system. As I said, maybe we are using the wrong tool to have timing. Moreover, it seems to me that the important tasks that would require timing would also require a lot more than just current HTM + timing (which is why I think you said partially) but I probably lack your experience in timing department.