Starting up Soar

(How to get a copy of Soar is available in the Soar FAQ.)

On UNIX machines

There are two recommended ways to start up Soar under UNIX.

  1. The most efficient way is to start up the Emacs editor and run Soar in a shell there. To do this, type "emacs", and a Emacs window will appear. (If you don't know how to use Emacs, you should do the Emacs tutorial by holding down the control key and typing 'h' and then 't'.)

    Then press and release the escape key and type "x", and then type "shell" and hit a carriage return. A window in Emacs will appear that acts like a UNIX shell (for it is). Then type "soar7" (if you have the alias set up) or the full path to Soar.

    You can hide this buffer, jump to it as you would any other buffer, scroll it, cut and paste. You can also type "ESC-p" repeatedly to recall previous commands.

  2. You can simply start up Soar in a plain shell window. This does not provide as much support, but you don't have to know Emacs. If you are going to work with Soar for a while, or will use computers for more than a year, it is worth learning the powerful Emacs editor.

Currently, at the U. of Nottingham, we are running Soar 7.0.0.beta, It automatically starts up in the directory where the tutorial models are, and it loads some aliases to make Soar easier to use. To start this up in a shell, type
/psyc/lang/soar/7/soar7

You may find that creating an alias for it is worthwhile. To do this, insert in your .login file the following line:

alias soar7 /psyc/lang/soar/7/soar7

If you are using Unix, here are some further changes you may want to make..

On the Mac

In the Macintosh environment you simply double click on the Soar icon to start it up. You should see an introductory banner and such, and then the prompt, "Soar> ".

You may have been presented this tutorial on a diskette. You should (but don't have to) copy the tutorial from the diskette to the hard drive. Doing so will make things run faster and more smoothly, but is not essential.

This sounds like a good deal, but the Macintosh version is not as reliable, the editors are not as good, and the graphic language included with Soar (Tk), is not available.

Should you require MacSoar, then the latest information and option to download an up-to-date version of Centro's MacSoar can be found if you click here.

An advanced Unix environment (currently broken)

There is a set of command to help Emacs work with Soar called SDE (Soar Development Environment). It doesn't work so well with Soar7, so for now you should leave it alone.

If you want to play with it at Nottingham, you should put the following lines in your .emacs file: 

;;; ******************* SDE *****************************
;;; Load up SDE at Nottingham.
;;;
;;;

(setq load-path
      (cons (expand-file-name "/psyc/lang/soar/sde/0.11")
            load-path ))

(load "sde")

(setq sde-soar-program
      "/psyc/lang/soar/6/2/5/bin/nnpscm/sun4/soar")

(setq sde-soar-defaults-file
      "/disks/one0h/research/rapidd/default-soar/default.soar")
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