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John E. Laird
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The Soar Cognitive Architecture

by John E. Laird (Author)
4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 11 ratings
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The definitive presentation of Soar, one AI's most enduring architectures, offering comprehensive descriptions of fundamental aspects and new components.

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.

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Previous page
  1. ISBN-10
    0262122960
  2. ISBN-13
    978-0262122962
  3. Publisher
    Mit Pr
  4. Publication date
    January 1, 2012
  5. Language
    English
  6. Dimensions
    7 x 1 x 9.5 inches
  7. Print length
    374 pages
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

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

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Mit Pr (January 1, 2012)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 374 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0262122960
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0262122962
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.68 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7 x 1 x 9.5 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 11 ratings

About the author

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John E. Laird

John E. Laird

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John E. Laird is the John L. Tishman Professor of Engineering at the University of Michigan.

John was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan and attended Huron High School. He then went to the University of Michigan as an undergraduate, majoring in Communication and Computer Science, graduating in 1975. He then worked at Bourroughs Corp. for one year, which although it was a worthwhile experience, convinced him to go to graduate school. He was fortunate enough to attend Carnegie Mellon University and work with Allen Newell and Paul Rosenbloom, graduating with a Ph.D. in 1983. From 1984 to 1986, he was a member of research staff at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. In 1986 he moved back to Ann Arbor and joined the faculty of the University of Michigan.

He started working on Soar in 1981, and it, together with the broader issues associated with cognitive architecture, has been the focus of his research ever since. He leads Soar's continued evolution, including the recent development and integration of reinforcement learning, episodic memory, semantic memory, visual and spatial mental imagery, and appraisal-based emotion. The new book is his attempt to summarize and organize his research on Soar and cognitive architecture more generally. Although it much more work than he expected, he is thrilled to have it published, and thanks his co-authors for all of their efforts.

In late 1997, early 1998, we co-founded of Soar Technology, Inc.

He is a Fellow of AAAI, AAAS, ACM, and the Cognitive Science Society.

John is married to Ann Alpern. He has three daughters: Emily, Jessica, and Valerie.

Customer reviews

4.3 out of 5 stars
4.3 out of 5
11 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Drummer
5.0 out of 5 stars good cognitve modelling book
Reviewed in the United States on December 15, 2013
Verified Purchase
This is very good book on cognitivr model with the framework of production system
Called Soar. Book is based upon the author long time esearch results. Nice thing about Soar is
Soar is open to use. Therefore,the reader can modelling his problem using Soar system. I have kindle
version and this is good to read. Nice things of this book contans historical back ground of
Soar approach and make comparison with other system like Act modelling. Now, I woud like to
model of driving using Soar system. The book has wide perpective on cognition from problem
Solving to emotion. So it is good to think about big pictures on human cognition.

Fumio Mizoguchi, professor of Tokyo Unv. of Science.
4 people found this helpful
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1vand1ng0
5.0 out of 5 stars Soar is the Bomb
Reviewed in the United States on November 19, 2018
Verified Purchase
I love the book. Expands the papers on Soar Cognitive Architecture and gives you an insight about Soar and Cognitive architectures in General. Newell would be proud of the book if he was alive. KUDOS soar, keep working towards a Unified theory of human-like cognition in Computational agents.
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Matthew R. Versaggi
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book - delivered as advertised.
Reviewed in the United States on April 19, 2019
Verified Purchase
Excellent book - delivered as advertised.
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Amazon Customer
1.0 out of 5 stars Too hi-level to be useful
Reviewed in the United States on March 16, 2016
Verified Purchase
Vague, fuzzy descriptions of high-level concepts. I could not find in this book useful information which can be directly applied to real-life problems.
4 people found this helpful
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