That is a good point. Swarming and the OPF go hand-in-hand. If you drop OPF, you also drop swarming. IMO the right thing is to decouple the two concepts, but then you need something like the OPF to provide an interface for parameter optimization. With regards to ongoing Numenta research, I see no need for swarming in the future (if there is, it will be highly specialized for some particular environment).
Numenta needs to run core algorithms in C++ in Python 3. Our plan is to create as few bindings as possible, with as small an API as possible, in htmresearch-core. That will be the Python 3 API for htmresearch. This is not expected to be the “official python 3” version, it is just for research. Of course anyone may try using it, but we’ll continue treating it like research.
The long and short answer is that Numenta will not be providing an “official” Python 3 version of HTM. The default Python 3 version will be whatever happens with the community fork. I would like to see it evolve as I described above.
We are splitting up NAB into two repos, one with the scoring logic and leaderboards, and the other with the detectors. The main repo with the scoring logic will be updated to Python 3. The repo with all the detectors has different runtimes (potentially one for each detector). See Does the current community version fully support NAB in Python 3.6? - #8 by rhyolight for details.