The Soar Cognitive Architecture

MIT Press

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Laird, John E.

Fachgebiete

• Mathematik | Informatik EDV | Informatik Informatik Künstliche Intelligenz
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften Interdisziplinär Neurowissenschaften, Kognitionswissenschaft

Über Autor(innen)

Laird, John E.
John E. Laird is John L. Tishman Professor of Engineering in the Computer Science
Division at the University of Michigan.