Extending The Soar Cognitive Architecture

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.

The original purpose of this research was to extend the Soar cognitive architecture based on knowledge gleaned from psychology and brain-based science. Specifically looking at extensions related to memory and learning (episodic, semantic) and emotion. The direction changed when an opportunity became available to collaborate with other biologically-inspired cognitive architecture (BICA) projects to design a completely new BICA called TOSCA. In addition to designing a new architecture, we also designed and implemented a framework that can be used to develop biologically-inspired cognitive architectures. The new framework is called STORM. Finally, throughout the development of TOSCA and STORM we continued the work on developing computational models of emotion. This work continued because even with the design of TOSCA, the exact role of emotion in cognitive architecture remains unclear.

Includes full-length papers, short position statements and also the papers presented in the post conference workshop on the sociocultural, ethical and futurological implications of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

Abstract: "The origins of the Soar architecutre can be traced back to the seminal research of Allen Newell and Herbert Simon on symbol systems, heuristic search, goals, problem spaces, and production systems. Since its official inception in 1982, Soar has evolved through six major releases, as both an AI architecture and as the basis for a unified theory of cognition. This paper traces this evolutionary path, starting with Soar's intellectual roots, and then proceeding through the stages defined by the six major system releases. Each stage is characterized with respect to a hierachy of four levels of analysis: the knowledge level, the problem space level, the symbolic architecture level, and the implementation level."

"This book presents the proceedings of the First International Conference on Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures (BICA 2010), which is also the First Annual Meeting of the BICA Society. A cognitive architecture is a computational framework for the design of intelligent, even conscious, agents. It may draw inspiration from many sources, such as pure mathematics, physics or abstract theories of cognition. A biologically inspired cognitive architecture (BICA) is one which incorporates formal mechanisms from computational models of human and animal cognition, which currently provide the only physical examples with the robustness, flexibility, scalability and consciousness that artificial intelligence aspires to achieve. The BICA approach has several different goals: the broad aim of creating intelligent software systems without focusing on any one area of application; attempting to accurately simulate human behavior or gain an understanding of how the human mind works, either for purely scientific reasons or for applications in a variety of domains; understanding how the brain works at a neuronal and sub-neuronal level; or designing artificial systems which can perform the cognitive tasks important to practical applications in human society, and which at present only humans are capable of. The papers presented in this volume reflect the cross-disciplinarity and integrative nature of the BICA approach and will be of interest to anyone developing their own approach to cognitive architectures. Many insights can be found here for inspiration or to import into one's own architecture, directly or in modified form."--Publisher description.

Cognitive architectures represent an umbrella term to describe ways in which the flow of thought can be engineered towards cerebral and behavioral outcomes. Cognitive Architectures are meant to provide top-down guidance, a knowledge base, interactive heuristics and concrete or fuzzy policies for which the virtual character can utilize for intelligent interaction with his/her/its situated virtual environment. Integrating Cognitive Architectures into Virtual Character Design presents emerging research on virtual character artificial intelligence systems and procedures and the integration of cognitive architectures. Emphasizing innovative methodologies for intelligent virtual character integration and design, this publication is an ideal reference source for graduate-level students, researchers, and professionals in the fields of artificial intelligence, gaming, and computer science.

There are many different approaches to understanding human consciousness. By conducting research to better understand various biological mechanisms, these can be redefined and utilized for technological purposes. Advanced Research on Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures is an essential reference source for the latest scholarly research on the biological elements of human cognition and examines the applications of consciousness within computing environments. Featuring exhaustive coverage on a broad range of innovative topics and perspectives, such as artificial intelligence, bio-robotics, and human-computer interaction, this publication is ideally designed for academics, researchers, professionals, graduate students, and practitioners seeking current research on the exploration of the intricacies of consciousness and different approaches of perception.

What Is Cognitive Architecture The term "cognitive architecture" can refer to both a theory about the structure of the human mind as well as a computational implementation of such a theory that is utilized in the fields of artificial intelligence (AI) and computational cognitive science. The term "cognitive architecture" can also be used interchangeably with "psychological architecture." The formalized models can be utilized both for the purpose of further refining an all-encompassing theory of cognition as well as for the development of a practical artificial intelligence program. The ACT-R and SOAR cognitive architectures are examples of successful cognitive architectures. Allen Newell is credited as being the one who first started the research on cognitive architectures as a software implementation of cognitive theories in the year 1990. How You Will Benefit (I) Insights, and validations about the following topics: Chapter 1: Cognitive Architecture Chapter 2: Cognitive Science Chapter 3: Connectionism Chapter 4: ACT-R Chapter 5: Unified Theories of Cognition Chapter 6: Computational Cognition Chapter 7: Computational Theory of Mind Chapter 8: CLARION (cognitive architecture) Chapter 9: LIDA (cognitive architecture) Chapter 10: Differentiable Neural Computer (II) Answering the public top questions about cognitive architecture. (III) Real world examples for the usage of cognitive architecture in many fields. (IV) 17 appendices to explain, briefly, 266 emerging technologies in each industry to have 360-degree full understanding of cognitive architecture' technologies. Who This Book Is For Professionals, undergraduate and graduate students, enthusiasts, hobbyists, and those who want to go beyond basic knowledge or information for any kind of cognitive architecture.