CHREST is a versatile architecture and variants have been used in a number of different projects.

Chess expertise

CHREST was originally developed to explore the development of chess expertise, and to date this area has received the most attention. Projects in this topic include:

CHUMP

CHUMP was a version of CHREST that played chess through pattern matching.

• Gobet F. and Jansen, P. (1994). Towards a chess program based on a model of human memory. In H. J. van den Herik, I. S. Herschberg, and J. W.Uiterwijk (Eds.), Advances in Computer Chess 7. Maastricht: University of Limburg Press.

SEARCH

SEARCH is a process-model of chess playing.

• Gobet, F. (1997). A Pattern-Recognition Theory of Search in Expert Problem Solving. Thinking and Reasoning, Vol. 3, No. 4, pp. 291-313.

ESRC Grant RES-000-23-1601

This is a recently-completed three-year project. The project has incorporated research into simulating the effect of ageing on expert behaviour. During this project we produced a new, enhanced, version of CHREST which incorporates the chess-playing abilities of CHUMP and extends this facility to use search techniques from SEARCH.

• F. Gobet and P.C.R. Lane, 'The CHREST architecture of cognition: The role of perception in general intelligence', to appear in Proceedings of the the third conference on Artificial General Intelligence, 2010.
• R. Ll. Smith, F. Gobet and P.C.R. Lane, 'Checking chess checks with chunks: A model of simple check detection', in A. Howes, D. Peebles, R. Cooper (Eds.), Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Cognitive Modelling', 2009.
• P.C.R. Lane, F. Gobet and R. Ll. Smith, 'Attention mechanisms in the CHREST cognitive architecture', in L. Paletta and J. K. Tsotsos (eds), Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Attention in Cognitive Systems, (Springer-Verlag) LNCS 5395, pp. 183-196, 2009.
• R. Ll. Smith, P.C.R. Lane and F. Gobet, 'Modelling the relationship between visual short-term memory capacity and recall ability', in The Second UKSim European Symposium on Computer Modelling and Simulation (IEEE Computer Society), pp. 99-104, 2008.
• R. Ll. Smith, F. Gobet and P.C.R. Lane, 'An investigation into the effect of ageing on expert memory with CHREST', in Proceedings of The Seventh UK Workshop on Computational Intelligence, 2007.

Language learning

This project employed a variant of CHREST known as MOSAIC to model how language is learnt by children. Areas that were looked at included:

Syntax acquisition

This research represents an attempt to model the child's acquisition of syntactic categories. The basic assumptions are that (1) syntactic categories are actively constructed by the child using distributional learning abilities; and (2)cognitive constraints in learning rate and memory capacity limit these learning abilities. The aim of the project is to build a distributional learning mechanism that is not only capable of constructing grammatical categories, but also of doing so in a way that is consistent with recent findings in the developmental literature on the sequencing of grammatical category acquisition. So far, the model has successfully simulated phenomena in six languages(English, Dutch, German, Spanish, French and K'iche').

Publications on syntax acquisition

Vocabulary acquisition

This research aims to model vocabulary acquisition in children. The central idea is to combine Gathercole and Baddeley's (1989) concept of phonological store with the notion of chunking, thus offering mechanisms to explain how the phonological store interacts with long-term memory. The input to this model is from a large-scale naturalistic study of children's early grammatical development, allowing the influence of the input to the model upon vocabulary acquisition to be examined.

Publications on vocabulary acquisition

The balance beam task

This research compares Piaget's theory of development with Feigenbaum and Simon's (1962, 1984) EPAM theory. An attempt is made to map the concepts of assimilation and accommodation in Piaget's theory onto the concepts of familiarisation and accommodation in EPAM. An EPAM-like model of the balance scale task has been developed with the aim to account for children's discontinuous, stage-like development.

Gobet, F.(1999). Simulations of stagewise development with a symbolic architecture. In J. P. Dauwalder & W. Tschacher (Eds.), Dynamics, synergetics, and autonomous agents. Singapore: World Scientific. Abstract  Preprint

Computer programming

This project modelled the ability of programmers to memorise computer programs. For more information, please see the technical report

Gobet, F., & Oliver, I. (2002). A Simulation of Memory for Computer Programs. (Tech. Rep. No. 74. University of Nottingham (UK): Department of Psychology, ESRC Centre for Research in Development, Instruction and Training. [pdf | abstract].

Concept formation

Gobet, F., Richman, H., Staszewski, J.,& Simon, H. A. (1997). Goals, representations, and strategies in a concept attainment task: The EPAM model. The Psychology of Learning and Motivation, 37, 265-290. Preprint

Lane, P. C. R., & Gobet, F. (2005). Discovering predictive variables when evolving cognitive models. Third International Conference on Advances in Pattern Recognition.  pdf

Lane, P. C. R., & Gobet, F. (2005). Multi-task learning and transfer: The effect of algorithm representation. Proceedings of the ICML-2005 Workshop on Meta-learning.pdf

Expertise in awalé

F. Gobet, 'Using a Cognitive Architecture for Addressing the Question of Cognitive Universals in Cross-Cultural Psychology', Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, Vol. 40, No. 4, 627-648, 2009.

Problem gambling

This project is developing CHREST models of problem gambling behaviours. Marvin Schiller and Fernand Gobet are currently working on this project. See here for more information.