# What counts as cheating in Monty? **URL:** \ **Category:** General\ **Created:** [September 20, 2026, 6:06am UTC](https://forum.thousandbrains.org/t/what-counts-as-cheating-in-monty/1203 "2026-09-20T06:06:56Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 9\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Bryan\_Leavelle](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex034/user_avatar/forum.thousandbrains.org/bryan_leavelle/32/751_2.png) [@Bryan\_Leavelle](https://forum.thousandbrains.org/u/Bryan_Leavelle)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2026, 6:06am UTC](https://forum.thousandbrains.org/t/what-counts-as-cheating-in-monty/1203/1 "2026-09-20T06:06:56Z")
Ive been dicking around with monty for a couple weeks now. As a tech/engineer I find myself doing all kinds of fun stuff at the interface between sense and cortex, world and organism-in-world. If Monty is just a cortex with a format for inputs, what am I allowed to do on the ins and outs? Obviously the brain is more than the cortex, and from what I can see any one sensory organ is far more complicated than the cortex offered from Monty. And that is as it should be: TBT says at that level the alg is the same, over and over, shared between columns. This is the easy part when you compare it to a cochlea or an eye. It’s a lot harder to get the motor response to click with a sense than it is for a sense to click with a brain. So, between the stock eyeballs and ears I find, and the stock cortex (Monty), what am I allowed to do between these two interfaces that would not be… cheating? I have already decided that its halting is a non-starter. Is the aim to do what animals do, or is the aim to make Monty make perfect instantaneous decisions? If there is an evolutionary principle to have as a rule (dont die, for instance, one that is not in Monty currently), am I allowed to code it in and see what falls out? How stable is the monty repo, and is it going to change on me in the next month in a way that will make all the fun stuff I’m doing now totally irrelevant? Thats my only question, stated in a whole bunch of questions. Thanks a thousand brains over for working on this. Its been nothing but fun for me. ---
**Author:** ![evanuno](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex034/user_avatar/forum.thousandbrains.org/evanuno/32/248_2.png) [@evanuno](https://forum.thousandbrains.org/u/evanuno)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2026, 6:05pm UTC](https://forum.thousandbrains.org/t/what-counts-as-cheating-in-monty/1203/2 "2026-09-20T18:05:34Z")
For the repo question, you got here just in time​😂 see [https://forum.thousandbrains.org/t/2026-07-upcoming-and-ongoing-engineering-platform-changes/1188](https://forum.thousandbrains.org/t/2026-07-upcoming-and-ongoing-engineering-platform-changes/1188) for the upcoming changes ---
**Author:** ![evanuno](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex034/user_avatar/forum.thousandbrains.org/evanuno/32/248_2.png) [@evanuno](https://forum.thousandbrains.org/u/evanuno)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2026, 6:09pm UTC](https://forum.thousandbrains.org/t/what-counts-as-cheating-in-monty/1203/3 "2026-09-20T18:09:15Z")
Here’s something on the other question [The road to a Generally-Intelligent Monty? - #9 by vclay](https://forum.thousandbrains.org/t/the-road-to-a-generally-intelligent-monty/882/9) ---
**Author:** ![evanuno](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex034/user_avatar/forum.thousandbrains.org/evanuno/32/248_2.png) [@evanuno](https://forum.thousandbrains.org/u/evanuno)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2026, 6:28pm UTC](https://forum.thousandbrains.org/t/what-counts-as-cheating-in-monty/1203/4 "2026-09-20T18:28:08Z")
[![](https://canada1.discourse-cdn.com/flex034/uploads/thousandbrains/original/2X/8/8639fd9c5f480b53b81e03d57c8a6013f8f10e40.jpeg "OHBM 2021 | Keynote | Anna Wang Roe | INS-fMRI: A Method for Mapping MesoscaleConnectomes in Nonh…") ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0svlN_4H4Q) This is a link from a reply to a post here (I’ll track the post down again) and the keynote speaker is the person who rewired a ferret brain, swapping the eyes and ears, and the brain reorganized itself. ---
**Author:** ![evanuno](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex034/user_avatar/forum.thousandbrains.org/evanuno/32/248_2.png) [@evanuno](https://forum.thousandbrains.org/u/evanuno)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2026, 6:39pm UTC](https://forum.thousandbrains.org/t/what-counts-as-cheating-in-monty/1203/5 "2026-09-20T18:39:18Z")
Found the post > [@Found cache of modern cortical column (mesoscale) neuroscience supporting Lateral "Voting"](https://forum.thousandbrains.org/t/found-cache-of-modern-cortical-column-mesoscale-neuroscience-supporting-lateral-voting/1046/2): > > I went thru some of her papers, pretty neat stuff. Seems like she spent the pandemic honing her apparatus to enable these studies, and results are gradually coming out. Also found a very interesting 2021 keynote from her: [[OHBM 2021 | Keynote | Anna Wang Roe | INS-fMRI: A Method for Mapping MesoscaleConnectomes in Nonh…] ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0svlN_4H4Q) …She was into columnar heterarchy before it was even cool! smiley ---
**Author:** ![Bryan\_Leavelle](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex034/user_avatar/forum.thousandbrains.org/bryan_leavelle/32/751_2.png) [@Bryan\_Leavelle](https://forum.thousandbrains.org/u/Bryan_Leavelle)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2026, 8:51pm UTC](https://forum.thousandbrains.org/t/what-counts-as-cheating-in-monty/1203/6 "2026-09-20T20:51:11Z")
o man these are great thank you for the links!!! ---
**Author:** ![tslominski](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex034/user_avatar/forum.thousandbrains.org/tslominski/32/5_2.png) [@tslominski](https://forum.thousandbrains.org/u/tslominski)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2026, 2:51pm UTC](https://forum.thousandbrains.org/t/what-counts-as-cheating-in-monty/1203/7 "2026-09-21T14:51:13Z")
> [@Bryan\_Leavelle](#): > > How stable is the monty repo, and is it going to change on me in the next month in a way that will make all the fun stuff I’m doing now totally irrelevant? [The repo makes breaking changes pretty much every week, but we do list what we break.](https://github.com/thousandbrainsproject/tbp.monty/releases) Sometimes these are small changes like removing or changing a method somewhere. Sometimes, the main parts of Monty are changed. We follow [semantic versioning](https://semver.org/), and [the MAJOR version 0 is intended to communicate that we intend to break things](https://github.com/thousandbrainsproject/tbp.monty/blob/main/rfcs/0007_monty_versioning.md#explanation). > We will use `MAJOR` version number `0` for the ongoing development of Monty. Incrementing the `MAJOR` version number beyond `0` should be a future RFC, as it will be a significant event. > > – [RFC 7 - Monty Versioning](https://github.com/thousandbrainsproject/tbp.monty/blob/main/rfcs/0007_monty_versioning.md#explanation) Things will not stabilize until MAJOR version 1. We do publish numbered versions frequently, though, so that if you pin to a specific Monty version, e.g., `v0.50.0`, then your code should continue to work. For example, [our repository accompanying the “Thousand Brains Systems: Sensorimotor Intelligence for Rapid, Robust Learning and Inference” paper, is pinned to `tbp.monty==0.1.0`](https://github.com/thousandbrainsproject/tbp.tbs_sensorimotor_intelligence/blob/97636792abbbf19bd16b964617ca28a5fc3eae8b/monty/environment.yml#L29) 🙂. Many code changes since then. ---
**Author:** ![Bryan\_Leavelle](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex034/user_avatar/forum.thousandbrains.org/bryan_leavelle/32/751_2.png) [@Bryan\_Leavelle](https://forum.thousandbrains.org/u/Bryan_Leavelle)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2026, 4:38pm UTC](https://forum.thousandbrains.org/t/what-counts-as-cheating-in-monty/1203/8 "2026-09-21T16:38:07Z")
excellent, thank you so much! ---
**Author:** ![AgentRev](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex034/user_avatar/forum.thousandbrains.org/agentrev/32/651_2.png) [@AgentRev](https://forum.thousandbrains.org/u/AgentRev)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2026, 7:25am UTC](https://forum.thousandbrains.org/t/what-counts-as-cheating-in-monty/1203/9 "2026-09-22T07:25:58Z")
Here’s the ferret paper from 1992 for those interested: [https://www.jneurosci.org/content/jneuro/12/9/3651.full.pdf](https://www.jneurosci.org/content/jneuro/12/9/3651.full.pdf)