Chunking in SOAR: The Anatomy of a General Learning Mechanism.

In this article we describe an approach to the construction of a general learning mechanism based on chunking in SOAR. chunking is a learning mechanism that acquires rules from goal-based experience. SOAR is a general problem-solving architecture with a rule-based memory. In previous work we have demonstrated how the combination of chunking and SOAR could acquire serch-control knowledge strategy acquisition and operator implementation rules in both search-based puzzle tasks and knowledge-based expert-system tasks. In this work we examine the anatomy of chunking in SOAR and provide a new demonstration of its learning capabilities involving the acquisition and use of macro-operators. Keywords Machine Learning, chunking.