[ACT-R-announce] First working version of ACT-R 6 now available!

[Dan Bothell]

On the ACT-R 6 web page <http://act-r.psy.cmu.edu/act-r6>
you can download version "1.0a1 [r20]" of ACT-R 6.  In
the zip file (or disk image) you will find all of the
files necessary to run ACT-R 6 as well as the tutorial
models for units 1-6 commented with the changes and
updates needed to run with ACT-R 6.  The solution models
are not included but are available under the same
restrictions as the current solutions i.e. by request, to
anyone who I can verify with some certainty is not taking
an ACT-R class and who also agrees to not redistribute them.

To start it up, load the load-act-r-6.lisp file.  That will
compile and load all of the other files necessary.  The
updated tutorial models can be found in the test-models
directory and there is a text file called test-models.txt
in the docs directory that describes a little about each
one.  You should be able to load and run those basically
the same way you would in ACT-R 5.

I have tested it in ACL 6.2 and LispWorks 4.2 under Windows
and MCL 5 and OpenMCL 0.14 under Mac OSX.  I assume that it
will work in other versions (both version # and OS) of
those Lisps, but it will not work with other Lisps at this
point.

About all I would recommend right now is running the tutorial
models because it is not yet complete.  It basically has only
the components and tools necessary to run those models and
little else.

Here is a list of some things that are NOT yet available:

- Documentation
- User manual
- Tutorial texts
- The Environment
- Production compilation
- lots of ACT-R functions (whynot, sdp, and other things
  that are useful for actually modeling)
- Lots of the functionality of the ACT-R/PM modules (they've
  only been tested to do enough to run the tutorial)

The sources are being maintained with a version control system
called subversion which is freely available at
<http://subversion.tigris.org/> and the ACT-R 6 archive can be
found at: svn://alba.psy.cmu.edu/usr/local/svnroot/actr6
for those that would like to checkout current copies.  The
[r20] in the version made available on the ACT-R web site
indicates that it is a snapshot of the r20 version in the
archive.

So, feel free to give it a try and let me know of any problems,
questions, or comments that you have.

Dan