jACT-R : making cognitive modeling portable

At the most recent ACT-R workshop, John Laird of SOAR fame, was curious as to the performance of ACT-R. Since ACT-R hasn't been concerned with this (in the past) the numbers weren't available off the top of Dan's head. I had some available, and now Dan and I are working on some common benchmarks, synthetic, but at least they are common.

Here are some early numbers before I dive into realtime issues and database backed models:

Big old batch of bug fixes as I make the mad-dash to the ACT-R workshop. Most of the fixes have to do with concurrency and stability. The intermittent lock-up on start has finally been diagnosed thanks to access to machines with many more cores. It looks as though some long standing motor module issues have finally been resolved allowing commands to be correctly handled when aborted by the model or common reality. Finally, the remote execution tool has been modified so that it can work correctly over VPN connections (the server is now the only one that runs a web service).

The remote execution tools permit the execution of iterative runs over the network. It can be run both locally and remotely, with auto-start options. The screencast below illustrates how to use this new feature. But first, it has to be installed:

• Update site : http://jactr.org/update/remote/
• Screencast

The following screencast illustrates how one can run batch model executions. This is useful for data collection as well as parameter space searches. As with the run configurations, listeners can be attached in order to influence and record the model behavior.

• Iterative runs

New release across all the projects. Eclipse 3.4 was released this past weekend and it is much improved. Serious speed improvements and some API changes that have allowed me to stop using some crazy hacks in the IDE. The updates to the code break binary compatibility with 3.3, so upgrading to 3.4 is required.

Big old release this time around that includes core, tools, and the IDE. A selection of the most interesting changes follows.

Core

New release. Various bugs and tweaks. However, there is one nice new feature.

Export as executable model

Forgot to mention.. there's a new release out. This is the update to the IRequest (javadoc pending) framework.

I've been doing a great deal of thinking about meta-cognition lately and what it would take to implement a general meta-cog capacity. It's no easy feat.. it requires variablized slot names, chunk-types and buffer references. P* gets kind of close, but not close enough.

What's new?

- movement tolerances for the visual system

- faster inline compiling

- buffer contents in log view tooltips

- ability to terminate runs from the log view (no more switching to console to kill)

- bug fixes

This release spans core, ide, and actr/s. Get them from the usual place.