Soar Tutorial

39th Soar Workshop


Monday-Tuesday May 6-7th @ 9-5 (BBB 1690)

This tutorial provides a whirlwind tour of Soar, including its historical background and context within the cognitive architecture research community. The focus will be on how and why Soar works, including syntax/structure for agents and Soar-enabled applications, as well as hands-on experience with the new components that have been developed over the past few years: reinforcement learning and semantic/episodic long-term memory.


Tutorial Software

Click the button to download all the software you'll need for this tutorial. Once downloaded, unzip - ideally the path does not contain spaces and is short (e.g. c:\temp\tutorial or /home/user/tutorial).

The only required software is Oracle Java 8. The software should "just work" on Windows, Mac OS, and Ubuntu (>= 14). Some platform-specific notes:

Windows

Mac OS

Ubuntu Linux

 

WordNet for Semantic Memory

Right-click the button and choose "Save As" to download a file that adds the contents of WordNet to Soar's Semantic Memory.

Note: the file is quite large (>80MB), so this process may take several minutes on a slow connection.


Slides

Hard copies of all slides will be made available at the tutorial.

Download Eclipse IDE for Java Developers to participate in the SML tutorial.

Introduction

Soar Basics

Reinforcement Learning in Soar

Impasses and Substates

Chunking

Semantic Memory

Episodic Memory

Soar Markup Language (SML)


Useful Links

Soar Home

A source for news, publications, and downloads.

The MIT Press: The Soar Cognitive Architecture

The definitive presentation of Soar from theoretical and practical perspectives, providing comprehensive descriptions of fundamental aspects and new components.