What is Soar?

Soar is a general cognitive architecture for developing systems that exhibit intelligent behavior. Researchers all over the world, both from the fields of artificial intelligence and cognitive science, are using Soar for a variety of tasks. It has been in use since 1983, evolving through many different versions to where it is now Soar, Version 9. We intend ultimately to enable the Soar architecture to:

• work on the full range of tasks expected of an intelligent agent, from highly routine to extremely difficult, open-ended problems
• represent and use appropriate forms of knowledge, such as procedural, declarative, episodic, and possibly iconic
• employ the full range of problem solving methods
• interact with the outside world, and
• learn about all aspects of the tasks and its performance on them.

In other words, our intention is for Soar to support all the capabilities required of a general intelligent agent.

For more general information about Soar, see the Soar home page. Many research papers and other publications are available on the Soar publications page.

Getting Started

The easiest way to get started with Soar is to obtain the latest distribution from the download page and work through all six parts of the tutorial (see Help and Documentation) and to do all of the exercises. Although it's tempting to skip the exercises, they're very useful and even fun.

Be sure to install the appropriate version of Java for your system (32-bit downloads will not work with 64-bit Java virtual machines and vice versa).

Download

Download Soar here.

Help and Documentation

The authoritative documentation for Soar is the Soar Manual. We also provide a set of tutorials for learning Soar hands-on. These are also available in the most recent Soar distribution under the share/soar/Documentation folder.

A PDF reader is needed to view the tutorial and much of our other documentation. A widely used free reader is the Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Report bugs and issues using the issue tracker.

Mailing lists related to Soar are available and users are encouraged to join:

Other Documentation

• Soar Dogma: Things nobody told you about coding in Soar that you probably ought to know.
• Soar Workshop Proceedings.
• Laird, J. E. (2008) Extending the Soar Cognitive Architecture. In Proceedings of the First Conference on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI-08).
• Abstract: One approach in pursuit of general intelligent agents has been to concentrate on the underlying cognitive architecture, of which Soar is a prime example. In the past, Soar has relied on a minimal number of architectural modules together with purely symbolic representations of knowledge. This paper presents the cognitive architecture approach to general intelligence and the traditional, symbolic Soar architecture. This is followed by major additions to Soar: nonsymbolic representations, new learning mechanisms, and long-term memories.
• Lewis, R.L. (2001) Cognitive theory, Soar. In International Encylopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Amsterdam: Pergamon (Elsevier Science).
• Lewis, R.L. (1999). Cognitive modeling, symbolic. In Wilson, R. and Keil, F. (eds.), The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Soar: A Functional Approach to General Intelligence
• Soar: A comparison with Rule-Based Systems
• Soar: Along the Frontiers (regarding future research)
• Block diagram of the Soar 9.3 architecture