[ACT-R-announce] New ACT-R 5 materials

[Dan Bothell]

I've just placed a bunch of new ACT-R 5 materials on our web site and some of 
them are rather significant, so I'm making a general announcement about them.


ACT-R version 5.0.6

The newest version of ACT-R 5 is available on the software page 
http://act-r.psy.cmu.edu/software.  The biggest difference between this 
version and the previous ones is that we have fixed an issue relating to the 
sources of activation for a retrieval.  In all of the previous versions of 5.0 
the sources of activation were the chunks in the slots of the goal that 
matched on the LHS of the production.  However, now the sources are the chunks 
in the slots of the goal after the RHS actions have been applied.  This is 
more consistent with the view that the productions modify the buffers and 
those changes then propagate to the modules to initiate actions.

ACT-R Environment

There is a new version of the Tcl/Tk based Environment.  It now includes the 
tutor modes as used in unit 1 of the tutorial.  It has also been extended to 
work with LispWorks in both Windows and Linux.  Finally, the windows version 
now includes a staticly linked executable of the Tcl/Tk libraries so it is no 
longer necessary to install Tcl/Tk before using the environment (I hope to 
have a similar executable available for Macs soon).

Because the new environment now supports the tutor modes of the tutorial the 
old environments (the Lisp specific versions) are no longer necessary, and 
will not be updated or maintained.  The tutorial material is being updated so 
that it contains the appropriate instructions for the new environment instead 
of the current Mac and Windows specific instructions.

Standalone Environment

I have also built a standalone environment for Windows which works without the 
need to have either a Lisp or Tcl/Tk installed.  It's a single installer 
program which once run (requires administrator privileges for NT/2000/XP) 
gives you a single executable (with a lot of support files around it) that 
runs the environment.  Because the GUI is in Tcl/Tk this version is almost 
indistinguishable from an environment running with a full Lisp, and it is a 
lot more stable (and usable) than the previous standalone version was.  As 
with the static Tcl/Tk library (actually a big piece of the standalone 
version) I hope to have a Mac version ready in the near future.

Additional Reference Material

Because ACT-R 5 differs so much from ACT-R 4 "The Atomic Components of 
Thought" doesn't really serve as a good reference for teaching ACT-R 5.  We've 
put a draft of a paper on our tutorials page 
(http://act-r.psy.cmu.edu/tutorials/) which should serve as a substitute for 
the background material that was provided by the early chapters of Atomic 
Components.

That's it for the new material.  If you have any questions, comments or 
problems with any of it please let me know.

Dan