http://anthonymharrison.com Digital thoughts and cognitive computations Sat, 05 Jul 2008 22:15:41 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Recently I finished (in so much as any software I develop is actually ever finished) a tool that allows bulk jACT-R model runs to be submitted to a remote server. All in all, it was an amazingly painless experience made possible by ECF, a protocol neutral communications library in the ... http://anthonymharrison.com/2008/07/05/ecf-experiences/ As usual after a day of writing, I needed to take a break. I decided to watch an old webinar on the Eclipse communications project. Why does a psychologist/roboticist care about a platform specific communications system? Aside from the possibilities of leveraging others work on shared editing, or even chat/IM ... http://anthonymharrison.com/2008/06/19/escape-from-writing/ It's so nice to have a productive week, even if you didn't get any of the things you needed to do done. The final dissertation error analyses have been hanging over my head like the sword of damocles. They need to be done so that I can generate a decent ... http://anthonymharrison.com/2008/05/23/comms-packages-and-slopes/ I am. I am. Surprise, surprise, my previous rant was completely unjustified. Turns out it was my own stupid fault. I was programmatically launching player, unfortunately I forgot to harvest the program's stdout and stderr. The process's buffers were flooded. Stooopid Ediot! But, at least the monkey sims can run for much ... http://anthonymharrison.com/2008/05/06/whos-a-great-big-idiot/ I love division of labor, it saves us all from having to reinvent the wheel.. but sometimes it just drives me insane. I've hooked up player/stage through a java client, enabling jACT-R (and the monkey models) to interact in the simulated robotic environment. For sometime now I've had a bug where ... http://anthonymharrison.com/2008/05/05/frackin-open-source/ After finally getting the movement tolerances working the jACT-R so that the robo-monkeys could finally see each other as they move around, I came upon a motor bug. Actually, I'm still trying to hunt down the exact circumstances under which it occurs. It's particularly challenging because it involves the interaction ... http://anthonymharrison.com/2008/04/16/eating-ones-own-dog-food/ First off, I'm not talking distributed representations, no, this is entirely about implementation. While the community is still some ways off from needing something like this, in the future many of us will be running models across much longer time-spans, both simulated and real. These models are going to seriously tax ... http://anthonymharrison.com/2008/04/09/distributed-memory-in-act-r/ For the past few days I've been working on implementing the movement tolerance handling in the visual system (and aural, configural, manipulative), and I'm really tired of it right now. It was supposed to have been easier than this (hell, it should have been done last week) - but it ... http://anthonymharrison.com/2008/04/09/tired-of-movement-tolerances/ It took longer than expected (what doesn't?), but the update to MINA 2 has been completed. MINA provides the underlying communications infrastructure between jACT-R and CommonReality (which provides the simulation brokering). The previous version had an out-of-order bug that took me forever to track down. I figured it was my ... http://anthonymharrison.com/2008/03/27/at-last/ Last week marked the first major deadline that I've had here at NRL. The boss man was presenting our work at a social cognition workshop that was populated by cognitive and developmental psychologists plus some roboticists. From his report, it was an interesting interchange. Our push leading up to it were ... http://anthonymharrison.com/2008/03/05/big-deadline-past-hri-around-the-corner/