From db30 at andrew.cmu.edu Wed Dec 23 15:12:03 2020 From: db30 at andrew.cmu.edu (db30 at andrew.cmu.edu) Date: Wed, 23 Dec 2020 15:12:03 -0500 Subject: [ACT-R-users] ACT-R software update and some CCL builds Message-ID: The ACT-R software available from the website has been updated. Here are the two most significant changes relative to the previous version: - Retrieval requests now have an additional request parameter called :rt-value which can be used to temporarily change the value of the retrieval threshold for that request. - Production compilation has been updated to allow productions which use indirect actions, e.g. =goal> g1 or +retrieval> =x, to be composed when possible. This is controlled by two new parameters: :cia which must be set to t to enable composition of indirect actions and :rir which controls how requests to retrieval style buffers are handled. The way an indirect action is handled for composition is to first instantiate it into the specified chunk's slots and values. Once that has been done, the normal composition process can be performed. The one exception to that is that if the :rir parameter is set to t then indirect request actions to retrieval style buffers are left as indirect actions when they are included in the composed production instead of being instantiated to slots and values. This version of the software also includes a first test of distributing ACT-R in a Docker container along with a Jupyter notebook server and notebook pages with Python code to run the tutorial models and tasks. Information on that can be found here: http://act-r.psy.cmu.edu/actr7.x/container_readme.txt Special thanks to Andrea Stocco for the suggestion and Jupyter examples and to Don Morrison for the Dockerfile examples which helped to make this available. In addition to updating the ACT-R software, I have also made available some custom builds of Clozure Common Lisp from sources that fix some issues they haven't rolled into released versions yet. A Windows version that fixes the problem many people encountered after a recent Windows update is available at: http://act-r.psy.cmu.edu/misc/win-ccl.zip A macOS version of the CCL GUI application that works for macOS 11 is available at: http://act-r.psy.cmu.edu/misc/ccl.zip If you have any questions or problems with this update let me know. Happy Holidays, Dan PS If you're working on a Mac and using ACT-R primarily through the remote interface, then I've found that the Docker version is actually faster than running ACT-R natively in SBCL. That's because the version of SBCL in the container does not have the threading performance issue which the Mac specific version does, and the overhead of running through Docker seems to be less than that performance hit for threading in the Mac version of SBCL.