[ACT-R-users] Running ACT-R on GNU/Linux

[db30 at andrew.cmu.edu]

--On Sunday, February 24, 2013 5:50 PM -0500 CW Dillon 
<cdillon2 at masonlive.gmu.edu> wrote:

> I thought I'd share a little shell script that I came up with to run ACT-R 6
> under Linux with the GUI, in case anybody else wants to do that. 
>
>
> My approach follows the procedures set out in the ACT-R 6 readme. To make it
> work, I made a few changes to my system:
> 1. I installed Clozure Common Lisp (CCL) [1] instead of the more typical
> Common Lisp (CLISP), following their instructions for setting the path, etc
> 2. I saved ACT-R6 into a directory where I put code ~/Code/actr6 
> 3. I created a copy of the 'load-act-r-6' startup script by adding a new line
> at the bottom that calls the '(start-environment)'
> 4. Then I wrote a little bash script [2] that performs the readme steps in
> the right order so that I only have to call a single file to have my ACT-R
> and the Tcl/Tk GUI, too
>
>
> [1] http://ccl.clozure.com/
> [2] https://gist.github.com/usuallycwdillon/5025926
>



I have two suggestions that may make that more convenient to use.  The
first is that instead of modifying the ACT-R load file you can create a new
lisp file with the start-environment call in it and put that file into the
user-loads directory.  Every .lisp file in that directory is loaded
automatically by the ACT-R load file after all the main ACT-R code.  That
way you won't have to modify the load file again if you update your ACT-R
source code.  The other suggestion is that instead of putting a fixed sleep
time into the startup script you could have the lisp code repeatedly try to
connect to the environment until it succeeds with something like this:

(while (null (start-environment)) (sleep 1))

That way it may be ready sooner and will also still start even if for
some reason the environment takes longer to get going than the fixed time
specified.

Dan