Yes, very much so. During the last 20 years, a major project has been to predict sequential patterns of brain activation during various tasks based on the activity of ACT-R modules (which have been associated with different brain regions) in models of the task.
All models are wrong, but some are useful. For several decades, ACT-R has been, and continues to be, one of the most useful and influential theories of cognitive architecture devised.
I was at Middlesex Poly in the late 80s / early 90s doing an AI degree. I'm pretty sure one of the things we used was the EXSYS expert system shell running on VAX/VMS (because that's where I first came across the name). We didn't use it much though because the AI group had a bunch of early Macs that everyone preferred.
This looks amazing! I'm guessing you may have answered these questions before somewhere so please point me to the information if so. I'd like to know what development environment you use (Emacs, SBCL and Slime?), what packages you used to create the graphics for the game, and what the game is compiled to. Thanks.
Interesting that Mark Churchland is the son of the 'neurophilosophers' Patricia and Paul Churchland. I'm not sure about Patricia but Paul was (maybe still is) a strong advocate of eliminative materialism who also discussed geometric representations of mental representation as points in a multidimensional state space over 20 years ago.
If you don't want the additional learning curve of Emacs and Slime, the author recommends just using sbcl and rlwrap (which makes programming in a terminal nicer).