Blogs

Thanksgiving isn't even here yet, much less the big winter holidays, but I've decided it's time for a present! The latest release brings some of the last few major fixes and features required for complete compatibility. Yes, 6.0 style associative links are finally here. The only things remaining are production compilation and a few small features on the PM side.

Enjoy.

One of the benefits of using the Eclipse platform for developing ACT-R models is that it supports a variety of tools for revision control and collaboration. Whether it is tracking down and reverting an errant change, sharing complete models, or collaboratively building them, Eclipse makes it quite simple. Here are a few pointers/best practices that you may want to consider.

Revision Control

Another day, another release. There were two big bugs recently uncovered dealing with capacity buffers and visual searches. Both have been resolved.

Capacity buffers have the ability to influence the priorities of instantiation selection. A buffer with more than one chunk can result in a single production having more than one instantiation. Unfortunately, since they will have the same utility, it's a crap shoot as to which should be chosen. This should be influenced by the ordering of the capacity buffer's ejection policy, but the procedural module was ignoring that. Fixed.

There is a new release available. There are no significant changes to the core, but IO and IDE have seen some additions. Try as I might to ignore my boss's constant pleas, the simple fact is, he signs the paychecks. So, here it is: Lisp (-ish) support!

You can now run lisp based models. However, there are a few caveats:

The latest release brings a few new features online to make customization of behavior easier. It also includes some IDE fixes, tweaks, and support for a future feature that most will find useful.

Core

There's a new release that is mostly just an IDE fix. Apparently for some time now the new project wizard has been borked and not creating the dependent directories correctly. That is fixed now. No more projects with build errors right after the wizard completes.

A new release is out that addresses the Eclipse 3.5 updates.

Installation Notes:

• Categories do not work (for some reason). Turn off "group by category" and you'll see the jACT-R bundles.
• Remote execution is unavailable for now. Enough has changed to the communications framework that 3.5 is incompatible.

New Features:

A new-ish release is out with the aural and visual modules that use a combined and generalized code base.

Apologies. Last week a tainted release made it out the door without my knowledge. Forgot to run the unit tests after fixing issues that FindBugs had found. Turns out one of them, wasn't a bug.. and produced some nasty results. So, if you've been running a model that was claiming a production couldn't be instantiated when you knew full well it could.. that was why. All is right with the universe again.

A new update is out today that makes the new motor system official. Prior releases using the new system had some hideous bugs associated with the timing of aborted movements. But with plenty of testing within the playerstage and robot interfaces, they seem to have been resolved.

This release also brings with it the ability to do longitudinal iterative runs (where the model learning is persisted across blocks of runs) - making for some interesting capabilities.