amharrison's blog

New release across all the projects. Eclipse 3.4 was released this past weekend and it is much improved. Serious speed improvements and some API changes that have allowed me to stop using some crazy hacks in the IDE. The updates to the code break binary compatibility with 3.3, so upgrading to 3.4 is required.

Big old release this time around that includes core, tools, and the IDE. A selection of the most interesting changes follows.

Core

• Added timing for the imaginal module (including separated add and modify times)
• visual searches can now be further customized through the use of IVisualLocationFilter, which can be added as a fully qualified class name parameter to the visual module
• finally broke all dependencies on AWT (java.awt.geom in particular)

Tools

New release. Various bugs and tweaks. However, there is one nice new feature.

Export as executable model

I've been doing a great deal of thinking about meta-cognition lately and what it would take to implement a general meta-cog capacity. It's no easy feat.. it requires variablized slot names, chunk-types and buffer references. P* gets kind of close, but not close enough.

What's new?

- movement tolerances for the visual system

- faster inline compiling

- buffer contents in log view tooltips

- ability to terminate runs from the log view (no more switching to console to kill)

- bug fixes

This release spans core, ide, and actr/s. Get them from the usual place.

Ok, I know.. I should have had a release out the door last week, but the out-of-order communication bug took longer to resolve than I'd thought. It's done now, so I've been working on some of the compatibility issues. Indexed retrievals are now disabled by default, but can be reinstated if you'd like. Movement tolerance in the visual system is up next along with object tracking.

This past month has seen a significant push to meet a demo deadline. During the course of the push, one of my coworkers at NRL kept correcting some mistakes in jACT-R. Many of them are not actually mistakes, but different implementation decisions. In those cases where its a definite bug, they are being corrected. Those that are just implementation differences, where it will make a big difference for lisp modelers, I will make the behavior parameterized and default that parameter to be consistent with the lisp.

Ok, sometimes I get questions such as "why did you sacrifice at least a full year of your graduate career to reimplementing a perfectly good system?" (actually, I'm paraphrasing because the actual questions typically question my sanity). Anyway...

It's been a little while, but that doesn't mean things haven't been progressing. Lots of new features, lots of improvements, and the usual slew of bug fixes.

Note worthy:

Here's a great intro to using the Eclipse workbench for those not already familiar with it.