jACT-R : making cognitive modeling portable

The last-command slot in buffer queries allows canonical lisp to see what the last request issued to a module was. Unfortunately, requests are not first-class model elements (can't be stored, retrieved, or even inspected), so !eval!s are required to make any significant sense of them.

The general probe is a combination two tools that provides a general capacity to track arbitrary parameters over time. On the runtime side, org.jactr.tools.grapher.core.GeneralProbe selects model elements (productions, chunks, types, modules, buffers, etc), based on regular expression name matches (quick and easy to implement, but a little wonky if you don't know reg-ex), and attaches probes to them. The general probe then sends that data to the IDE where it is rendered in the jACT-R Probes view.  

To help debug models that rely upon the visual system, jACT-R includes a graphical visicon viewer. It's a little rough around the edges right now, but it is certainly functional.

Using Visicon Viewer

To use, simply enable the visicon tracer in the run configuration for your model. Once the model starts, the visicon viewer (lower-left corner of the IDE) should be updated.

Tracers are special instruments that have a GUI component installed in the IDE. These are a tad more complicated, but certainly within the realm of an experienced java programmer.
Tracers typically record and send massive amounts of data to the IDE, so care must be taken to handle the information in a responsive manner that doesn't make the IDE unusable.

Instruments are simple tools that can be attached at runtime to any model or model element and are intended to modify or record behavior. They do not interface with the IDE.
Instruments can be easily built by extending the IInstrument interface. Instruments can be made visible to the IDE by using the instruments extension point.

The IDE includes many useful tools both for tracing/inspecting model execution and for recording information.

Broadly speaking, there are tool classes of tools: instruments and tracers.

Provides access to production compilation and utility learning

There is no manual system, just a global motor system. The motor system is a drop-in replacement with the same basic functionality, plus a few bells and whistles.

Muscle-level parallelism

If EnableMuscleLevelParallelism is true, motor programs can be prepared and executed in parallel so long as they don't overlap in the muscle groups used.

Compound commands

There is now a super useful (although still somewhat flaky) tool to probe arbitrary model element parameters (models, productions, chunks, modules, buffers), across time. It comes in two part: runtime probe and viewer.

To use it, you need to enable the GeneralProbe in run configuration and provide it the location of a probe file.

One of the biggest hassle in Java is managing the classpath. OSGi takes care of some of the problems, but sometimes you still get bitten by FileNotFound or ClassNotFound, and yet the file/class is right there! Here's a checklist of things to look at when it comes to this problem: