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Soar Homepage

Soar is a general cognitive architecture for developing systems that exhibit intelligent behavior. For more in-depth information, see our about page, or J.E. Laird's 2012 book, The Soar Cognitive Architecture, available from Amazon and MIT Press.

To get started, download Soar and follow the quick start guide.

News and Announcements

  • Soar 9.6.2 available for download: This release of Soar contains ergonomic improvements to the debugger and Soar CLI, lots of new VisualSoar features, and plenty of bug fixes and stability improvements.
  • 43rd Soar Workshop 2023 The University of Michigan Soar group will host the 43rd Soar Workshop from June 14th-15th 2023. There will be a beginner Soar tutorial on June 12th-13th and an advanced tutorial on June 15th-16th.
  • No VISCA 2023
  • A Demonstration of Compositional, Hierarchical Interactive Task Learning Mininger and Laird win Best Demonstratation for the 2022 AAAI Conference.
  • VISCA-2021 The University of Michigan Soar group hosted VISCA-2021, the Virtual International Symposium on Cognitive Architecture, on June 7-11, 2021. VISCA included leaders from across the breadth of cognitive architecture, including research on modeling human behavior, neural-cognitive architectures, functional capabilities of cognitive architectures, components of cognitive architectures, and their applications. Follow the link to learn more.
  • Rosie is on GitHub To learn more about the Soar group's interactive task learning (ITL) research, please visit the recently updated Rosie site.
  • Laird and Rosenbloom awarded Herbert A. Simon Prize Congratulations to Professor John Laird and Professor Paul Rosenbloom for being awarded the 2018 Herbert A. Simon Prize for Advances in Cognitive Systems! This lifetime achievement award recognizes their 30 years of research on cognitive architectures, especially their Soar project, their applications to knowledge-based systems and models of human cognition, and their contributions to theories of representation, reasoning, problem solving, and learning.
  • Soar dances at the Smithsonian LuminAI is a dome-based art installation at the National Museum of American History in which participants can engage in collaborative movement improvisation with each other and with virtual Soar-based dance partners, developed at the ADAM Lab. (event)
  • Soar goes underwater WPSU, Penn State's PBS affiliate, produced a news piece featuring IVER; an autonomous underwater vehicle piloted by Soar agents that is being developed at ARL.