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Soar Homepage

Soar is a general cognitive architecture for developing systems that exhibit intelligent behavior. For more in-depth information, see our about page, or J.E. Laird's 2012 book, The Soar Cognitive Architecture, available from Amazon and MIT Press.

To get started, download Soar and follow the quick start guide.

If you are looking for help or discussion, please see our support page.

News and Announcements

  • This year’s Soar workshop will be held on May 5, 2025, at the University of Michigan’s Beyster Building on North Campus in Ann Arbor, MI. It will be a hybrid workshop, with remote participation via Zoom. As in the past, it will be free. Our guest speaker this year is Professor Jonathan Cohen of Princeton. Registration for workshop attendance and talks is now open! Please fill out the form here. Please contact John Laird if you have any questions.
  • soar_ros, a ROS2 package by Moritz Schmidt that enables integration between ROS and Soar, is now available on GitHub.
  • Engineer's Guide to Soar: A 14-part course on programming Soar for engineers, by Bryan Stearns is now available on GitHub.
  • Soar 9.6.3 available for download: This release of Soar contains ergonomic improvements to the debugger and Soar CLI, lots of new VisualSoar features, and plenty of bug fixes and stability improvements. Note: if you are a Mac user with an Intel processor and you downloaded the release prior to August 19, 2024, then you will need to re-download. There was an issue with the setup script for Mac/Intel users which would prevent running Soar.