Soar A Cognitive Architecture In Perspective

Soar

Soar: A Cognitive Architecture in Perspective

Soar: A Cognitive Architecture in Perspective represents a European perspective on Soar with the exception of the special contribution from Allen Newell arguing for Unified Theories of Cognition. The various papers derive from the work of the Soar Research Group that has been active at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, since 1987. The work reported here has been inspired in particular by two topics that precipitated the group's interest in Soar in the first place -- road user behavior and the temporal organization of behavior, more specifically planning. At the same time, the various contributions go well beyond the simple use of Soar as a convenient medium for modeling human cognitive activity. In every paper one or more fundamental issues are raised that touch upon the very nature and consistency of Soar as an intelligent architecture. As a result the reader will learn about the operator implementation problem, chunking, multitasking, the need to constrain the depth of the goal stack, and induction, etc. Soar is still at a relatively early stage of development. It does, nevertheless, constitute an important breakthrough in the area of computer architectures for general intelligence. Soar shows one important direction that future efforts to build intelligent systems should take if they aim for a comprehensive, and psychologically meaningful, theory of cognition. This is argued in a powerful way by Newell in his contribution to this volume. For this reason, the Soar system will probably play an important integrative role within cognitive science in bringing together important subdomains of psychology, computer science, linguistics, and the neurosciences. Although Soar is not the only `architecture for intelligence', it is one of the most advanced and theoretically best motivated architectures presently available. Soar: A Cognitive Architecture in Perspective is of special interest to researchers in the domains of cognitive science, computer science and artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, and the philosophy of mind.

The Soar Cognitive Architecture

The definitive presentation of Soar, one AI's most enduring architectures, offering comprehensive descriptions of fundamental aspects and new components. In development for thirty years, Soar is a general cognitive architecture that integrates knowledge-intensive reasoning, reactive execution, hierarchical reasoning, planning, and learning from experience, with the goal of creating a general computational system that has the same cognitive abilities as humans. In contrast, most AI systems are designed to solve only one type of problem, such as playing chess, searching the Internet, or scheduling aircraft departures. Soar is both a software system for agent development and a theory of what computational structures are necessary to support human-level agents. Over the years, both software system and theory have evolved. This book offers the definitive presentation of Soar from theoretical and practical perspectives, providing comprehensive descriptions of fundamental aspects and new components. The current version of Soar features major extensions, adding reinforcement learning, semantic memory, episodic memory, mental imagery, and an appraisal-based model of emotion. This book describes details of Soar's component memories and processes and offers demonstrations of individual components, components working in combination, and real-world applications. Beyond these functional considerations, the book also proposes requirements for general cognitive architectures and explicitly evaluates how well Soar meets those requirements.