On-line Soar Tutorial Version 2
Last revised 8/III/96

		[Quick HT]	    [Quick Analogy]

Soar is a production system often used in writing artificial intelligence (AI) programs, but it is also often used for cognitive modelling.

This document aims to be a completely self-contained online introductory tutorial of Soar with an emphasis on cognitive modelling. We will pay some heed to the AI and programming aspects of Soar, as we must -- as a cognitive modelling theory Soar proposes that intelligence consists of a set of mechanisms that do not change across tasks, that is, the architecture, and that knowledge of how to perform tasks is also necessary -- hence intelligence has aspects of being programmable. What this means and how we go about doing it with Soar is what this tutorial is all about.

The major difference between this tutorial and other Soar materials and other Web documents, is that it is designed to be used with a running Soar. We have included several simple (and some not so simple) exercises to test and further your understanding while reading the tutorial.

This tutorial when presented 'live', takes about 3.5 hours for the hungry-thirsty material and about 3.5 hours for the analogy material. You might plan on spending about that time, including some reading, unless you run into problems with getting Soar installed or a silly syntax bug such as forgetting to close a parenthesis.

If you have any questions, please email one of us -- Frank Ritter, 28 Feb 1996.

Using the tutorial

Details on how to use the Soar tutorial. If you have never seen a hypertext document before then you should click the mouse here before looking at how to use the tutorial.

Soar tutorial based on the hungry-thirsty model

A full Soar tutorial, including exercises to do on a simple Soar model.

Analogy tutorial

A set of more advanced exercises on part of a real world Soar model.