[ACT-R-users] Running ACT-R in Lispworks

[Dan Bothell]

--On Thursday, January 15, 2004 5:49 PM +0000 Mark A Wood 
<cspmaw at cs.bath.ac.uk> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm a PhD Student running a cognitive science simulation in ACT-R. I'm
> using Xanalys Lispworks Personal Edition on Linux Red Hat 9. My work is
> being held up quite badly by the fact that Lispworks will only allow me
> to run 1 or 2 experimental runs before exceeding the limited heap size
> provided by the Personal Edition. Does anyone know if there ia a way
> round this - am I generating something behind the scenes which is taking
> up room and that I can turn off?
>

There is probably very little that you can do to improve the performance
with the free version of LispWorks.  That corresponds basically to what
I saw when testing the ACT-R tutorial models.  Depending on the
model/experiment they would all run, but there were very few trials which
could run without exhausting the heap for most of them.  The limited heap
that they give is fairly restrictive (at least with respect to ACT-R) and
just loading the full ACT-R 5 consumes quite a bit of things.

One could go in and hand tool the ACT-R so as to excise anything you didn't
need and perhaps tweak some things here and there in terms of space
requirements.  However, overall I doubt it's worth the effort because you're
still probably going to hit that limit fairly quickly.  That leaves you
with basically one option - get a "complete" Lisp system.  Since you said
you're using Linux you've got several options.  The most expensive would
be to buy a version of Allegro Common Lisp from Franz Inc..  You could
also buy the full version of LispWorks, which is cheaper than ACL, but may
still be too much.  The cheapest option would be to get a copy of CMUCL
or CLisp because they're free.  CMUCL works fine with ACT-R (and the ACT-R
Environment now) and there are several other people using that combination
who may be willing to help.  CLisp is very fast, but there are a few known
problems with using it with ACT-R and it does not work with the ACT-R
Environment at this point. I don't know how many users are actually using
CLisp with ACT-R, so you may not find much in the way of help either, but I
really just don't know there.

Hope that helps, and sorry I don't have an easier solution for you.

Dan