A Preliminary Analysis of the Soar Architecture as a Basis for General Intelligence

The central scientific problem of artificial intelligence is to understand what constitutes intelligent action and what processing organizations are capable of such action. Human intelligence shows, to first observation, what can only be termed general intelligence. The Soar project has been attempting to understand the functionality required to support general intelligence. In this article we take a step towards providing an analysis of the Soar architecture as a basis for general intelligence. Included are discussions of the basic assumptions underlying the development of Soar, a description of Soar cast in terms of the theoretical idea fof multiple levels of description, an example of Soar performing multi-column subtraction, and three analyses of Soar its natural tasks, the sources of its power, and its scope and limits.