[ACT-R-users] ACT-R robot

[Dan Bothell]

--On Tuesday, June 24, 2008 8:04 AM -0700 Bruce J Weimer MD 
<bjweimer at charter.net> wrote:


> Also, I was wondering as I read the papers, is information that's learned
> during a session with the robot stored or saved when the robot's turned
> off  or is it lost?  I'm reading through the ACT-R tutorials and it seems
> that  each time a model is run, it's reset to run again - there (so far)
> hasn't  been any mention of a mechanism to save the information in
> declarative  memory, weights, latencies, etc.
>

There is no mechanism built into ACT-R for saving the internal state of any
module or the system in general.  However, depending on what you want to
save, it's usually not too difficult to just cache that out and read it
back in later.

For example, here's a function which will create a file with the commands
to rebuild the chunks in declarative memory and restore their parameters
(only one of the declarative parameters is included here for brevity):

(defun save-chunks (file-name)
  (let ((chunks (no-output (dm)))
        (params (no-output (sdp :name :reference-count)))
        (cmdt (car (no-output (sgp :cmdt)))))

    (sgp-fct (list :cmdt file-name))

    (command-output "(add-dm ")

    (dolist (x chunks)
      (command-output "(")
      (pprint-chunks-fct (list x))
      (command-output ")"))
    (command-output ")")

    (dolist (x params)
      (command-output "(sdp ~A :reference-count ~s)" (first x) (second x)))

    (sgp-fct (list :cmdt cmdt))))

The file that writes out could then just be loaded later to restore the
model's declarative memory.  A similar function could be written to dump
the productions and their parameters (see the reference manual for the
relevant commands).

Depending on how the general parameters for the model are set there may
be some other things that would need to be adjusted as well, but those
sorts of things are going to vary from model to model.  One example would
be either advancing the time to where the "old" model left off or adjusting
all of the declarative parameters to reflect the "current" time being
necessary if base-level learning were enabled.

Dan