The Soar 9.6.0 tutorial is a guide for learning to create software agents in Soar. It assumes no prior knowledge of Soar or computer programming. The goals of the tutorial are:
  • Introduce you to the basic operating principles of Soar
  • Teach you how to run Soar programs and understand what they do
  • Teach you how to write your own Soar programs
This is about the nuts and bolts of writing Soar programs, but not about the theory behind Soar. Each lesson introduces concepts one by one and gives you a chance to use them by creating Soar agents. Each lesson builds on the previous ones, so it is important to go through them in order. To make the best use of this tutorial, we recommend that you read the tutorial, do the exercises, run the programs, and write your own Soar agents. Although the tutorial is long, you should be able to work through it quickly.

The tutorial is an excellent companion download for those reading The Soar Cognitive Architecture.

How to Install and Launch Soar
  1. Download Soar 9.6.0 Tutorial Multi-Platform and extract to the folder of your choice
    • Windows users: Avoid path names that are very long or contain spaces or parentheses. They can prevent the software from running.
  2. Navigate to the folder you extracted to
  3. Read, understand and perform the tasks in each chapters of the tutorial.
    • There is a separate pdf for each chapter, as well as a pdf for the Soar manual.
  4. To launch the Soar programs described in the tutorial
    • To launch Soar within a graphical user interface:
      • Windows users, run SoarJavaDebugger.bat
      • Linux and Mac users, run SoarJavaDebugger.sh
    • To launch Soar using a command line interface:
      • Windows users, run Soar_CLI.bat
      • Linux and Mac users, run Soar_CLI.sh
      • You can also navigate to the /bin directory in a terminal and run the Soar executable directly
    • There are also batch/shell scripts to launch the other programs described in the tutorial:
      • VisualSoar.sh and VisualSoar.bat
      • Eaters.sh and Eaters.bat
      • TankSoar.sh and TankSoar.bat

The Soar Manual is not included in the download and can be found here.

Note:This binary download requires a 64-bit operating system. If you'd like to use the graphical debugger, Java must also be installed.

The following menu allows you to access two other sections:
  1. Troubleshooting tips
  2. Getting additional help