I'm pretty much tossing aside the three section break up of these weekly updates and making it two. It is really getting to hard to differentiate between theoretical and practical matters. So there will be a general working update and a general social update from now on I think. I think this will work better. It has already kinda been implemented in the last update so you guys shouldn't be so shocked about these things! But don't worry there will still be PLENTY of jokes so you won't miss out too much. Alright! Let's giver! Onto Week Six: Computing Scientists in an Adventure with Birthdays! (I realize my naming of the weeks is highly confusing to people other than me who don't know some of the even more personal zaniness that goes on at school but this blog isn't just for you my dear friends! It's hopefully going to remind me of my summer as well. So I'm just throwing in these little notes to make me smile.)
So That MAY be interpreted as me between a rock and two rocks. Or you between a rock and two rocks. But really it should be read "Rock, you rock, Rock" Where Rock is a specific rock and rock is the verb. I consider this may be confusing. It's a reference to a film. I'm feeling entirely silly. Alright, I digress. However the other interpretation is also somewhat applicable as this was my first go at writing a production system for ACT-R that wasn't part of the tutorials (and thus not completely explicitly spelt out for me). So perhaps it's wasn't as terrible as being stuck between some rocks but it was definitely confusing at first. To make sure I understood how Renee's previously written model worked so that I could modify it, I started reading through the model portion, which is written in Lisp. I had a pretty sweet time looking through some of the Lisp documentation online and thanking my stars that I have to take a class next semester that uses Lisp so I will have an instructor to ask questions of, because the intertron may have answers but it isn't always willing to spit them out in a coherent manner. So I spent some time doing that.
Aside from working on modifying Renee's bottom up cueing system for intention handling I was also hoping to look into how Buffers are created in ACT-R, which is a new addition to version 6. This proved to be somewhat more challenging. But weeding through the documentation gave me more insight into other technical details about ACT-R however no dice on the intention buffer I was hoping to assemble. I had a go at changing Renee's model. The basic reason we were revisiting the ideas was that it was proposed that some of the complexity of the productions could be moved into the declarative representation, leaving a cleaner clearer algorithm that was a little bit more bottom up than the first attempt and was a bit fairer to the idea that bottom up cueing occurs in the brain and how it might work. So I worked on this for a bit, and felt ridiculously stupid because I couldn't convince myself that what I was working on was right and that I was understanding as much as I should. Taking up my lesson from last week, instead of beat myself up I decided to track down Renee and let loose a torrent of questions upon her.
One lengthy meeting later and I was feeling a little more confident. We'd revised the ideas we'd talked about last week and now I felt entirely certain of how I was going to approach things. The weekend brought me to a point where I felt things were clearer and what I was working on was going to work. I felt like I'd made a lot of progress. And now wasting 2 hours discovering a typo didn't feel so futile because I was certain I was getting to an end and I was actually building on something. In the end I would have a concrete working revised version of her model I could show her and I would have established methods for finding all my silly little mistakes. I was discovering the sneakiness of the ACT-R environment and all it's helpful little tools as well as just identifying my common errors and weak spots. All in all I think our meeting next Tuesday will be good. Hopefully all Monday won't be eaten up by fixing the rest of these bugs.
But here's to that eh! Wow. I think I managed to use like 10 different tenses there. Insert Douglas Adams Restaurant at the end of the Galaxy reference here. A'ight. Here's where I sign off on the "smart" talk and move onto something a little more silly
So as a surprising result of my meeting with Renee this week, we have been talking about sending me to a cognitive sciences conference this summer. Renee has asked me if I would be interested in going to CogSci in Vancouver in July. She is going to talk to one of the other professors about sending one of their other students as well so I'd have a friend. Either way this would be the most exciting! I've never been to a conference and I haven't been on an airplane since I was eleven so a lot o excitement to be had there! I hope everything works out.
Things in the lab are going along lovely. I have been slowly trying to tap the musical veins that run under the surface of this lab. I have managed to convince several of my friends to joint he summer concert band here on campus with me and have slowly been trading cds and playlists with people in the lab. I am currently working on a crazy mix for Chris. Either way, by the end of the summer, this lab is going to be rocking!
In other news I feel it necessary to wish Andrew a Happy Birthday here, and wish my friend Curtis a safe journey on his trip to Greece. Andrew is now ancient (just joking dear) and Curtis is going for a conference in Greece, the same I mentioned Eleni Stroulia would be attending. As he is a former student of Eleni's, he will have the privilege of enjoying her and her husbands hospitality while there. Wow! What fortune! I think that is all that is new! Take care and in the future be careful to avoid the point exclamation points that seem to have taken over this site. I apologize I'm just a very excitable person. Keep rockin' the free world my friends. Cheers!