At least one of the key biologically-inspired experiments using HTM algorithms seems to produce reasonable results when run with 100 minicolumns per cortical column. (See further down that thread, and also this earlier thread, for reference to the Numenta paper, and description of the HTM-scheme implementation of the experiment: it was originally run with the Numenta SDR configuration of 20 ‘on’ bits in 1024, but can produce comparable output with 4/100.)