Soar: A Cognitive Architecture in Perspective - A Tribute to Allen Newell

emSoar: A Cognitive Architecture in Perspective/em represents a European perspective on emSoar/em with the exception of the special contribution from Allen Newell arguing for emUnified Theories of Cognition/em. br/ The various papers derive from the work of the Soar Research Group that has been active at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, since 1987. The work reported here has been inspired in particular by two topics that precipitated the group's interest in emSoar/em in the first place -- road user behavior and the temporal organization of behavior, more specifically planning.
At the same time, the various contributions go well beyond the simple use of emSoar/em as a convenient medium for modeling human cognitive activity. In every paper one or more fundamental issues are raised that touch upon the very nature and consistency of emSoar/em as an intelligent architecture. As a result the reader will learn about the operator implementation problem, chunking, multitasking, the need to constrain the depth of the goal stack, and induction, etc.
br/ emSoar/em is still at a relatively early stage of development. It does, nevertheless, constitute an important breakthrough in the area of computer architectures for general intelligence. emSoar/em shows one important direction that future efforts to build intelligent systems should take if they aim for a comprehensive, and psychologically meaningful, theory of cognition. This is argued in a powerful way by Newell in his contribution to this volume.
For this reason, the emSoar/em system will probably play an important integrative role within cognitive science in bringing together important subdomains of psychology, computer science, linguistics, and the neurosciences. Although emSoar/em is not the only `architecture for intelligence', it is one of the most advanced and theoretically best motivated architectures presently available. br/ emSoar: A Cognitive Architecture in Perspective/em is of special interest to researchers in the domains of cognitive science, computer science and artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, and the philosophy of mind.
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