[ACT-R-users] act-r interface

[Dan Bothell]

--On Sunday, August 01, 2010 2:11 AM -0700 paria shams <paria_khorshid at yahoo.com> wrote:

>
> hello
> i want to have interface for my act-r project but i dont know how to conect it with c# or java
> !!i mean , which programing language should i have work to design interface for act-r?
> how to design interface for it?
> is it possible to design interface in c# and connect it to lisp act-r ?
> thanks
> with best regards
>

There are essentially two pieces to that.  One is how to create an
interface for ACT-R to some arbitrary task, and the other is how to
connect a Lisp running ACT-R to some external system if.

For the first piece what is required is to create a "device" for
ACT-R.  A device is used to provide the perceptual input to ACT-R
and to accept the motor actions which ACT-R creates.  By default
ACT-R comes with devices for basic interactions with the GUIs in
some Lisp applications (ACL, LispWorks, and MCL) as well as a
simple virtual GUI which will work in any Lisp.  To go along
with those devices there is also a small set of GUI tools which
can be used to create an interface in any of the Lisps which
will run ACT-R.

Those GUI tools are described in the ACT-R tutorial units' experiment
description documents.  If you want to create your own device, then
you can find the documentation in the ACT-R reference manual
and the Power Point presentation titled "extending-actr.ppt" found
in the docs directory of the ACT-R 6 distribution.  There are also
example devices which go along with that Power Point presentation
which can be found in the examples directory of the ACT-R 6 distribution.

The second issue, how to connect Lisp to some external language/system,
however does not have an easy answer.  There are basically no tools
built into ACT-R for doing so because every Lisp application is going
to have its own interfaces and libraries for supporting linking to
other systems or performing inter-process communications.  Thus, you
will have to consult your Lisp's documentation to determine what
it supports and how to use that to connect with your external task.

The only thing which ACT-R does make available is an abstraction
of the commands for opening, reading from, and writing to passive
text based TCP/IP sockets in several Lisps (ACL, LispWorks, MCL,
OpenMCL/CCL, CMUCL, and SBCL).  Those functions can be found in the
file called "uni-files.lisp" in the support directory of the ACT-R 6
distribution.

Hope that helps, and let me know if you have other questions,
Dan