Knowledge-based systems, Overview, SOAR, AGENT DEVELOPMENT AND SOFTWARE

Agent development

The standard approach to developing an agent in Soar starts with writing rules that are loaded into procedural memory, and initializing semantic memory with appropriate declarative knowledge. The process of agent development is explained in detail in the official Soar manual as well as in several tutorials which are provided at the research group's website.

Software

Extending the Soar Cognitive Architecture by John Laird, 2008.

The Soar architecture is maintained and extended by John Laird's research group at the University of Michigan.

The current architecture is written in a combination of C and C++, and is freely available (BSD license) at the research group's website.

Soar can interface with external language environments including C++, Java, Tcl, and Python through the Soar Markup Language (SML). SML is a primary mechanism for creating instances of Soar agents and interacting with their I/O links.

JSoar is an implementation of Soar written in Java. It is maintained by SoarTech, an AI research and development company.

JSoar closely follows the University of Michigan architecture implementation, although it generally does not reflect the latest developments and changes of that C/C++ version.^[5]