DOCUMENT RESUME ED 275 302 IR 012 361 AUTHOR Laird, John E. TITLE Soar User's Manual. INSTITUTION Xerox Corp., Palo Alto, CA. Palo Alto Research Center. SPONS AGENCY Office cf Naval Research, Arlington, Va. Personnel and Training Research Programs Office. REPORT NO XEROX-PARC-ISL-15 PUB DATE 31 Jan 86 CONTRACT N00014-82C-0067 NOTE 114p.; For a description of the Sear system, see IR 012 360. PUB TYPE Guides - General (050) -- Reports - Descriptive (141) EDRS PRICE MF01/PC05 Plus Postage. DESCRIPTORS Annotated Bibliographies; Cognitive Processes; *Decision Making; *Expert Systems; Heuristics; Objectives; *Problem Solving; Programing Languages; Search Strategies IDENTIFIERS Chunking; LISP Programing Language; *Soar Project ABSTRACT This manual describes Version 4 of Soar, an architecture for problem solving and learning based on heuristic search and chunking. Version 4 is available as of January 1986 in Common Lisp, Franz-Lisp, Interlisp, and Zeta-Lisp. An introduction to the Soar system is presented, and information is provided about the following system aspects: (1) data representation in working memory; (2) production representation; (3) decision procedure; (4) subgoals; (5) default search control; (6) chunking; (7) encoding a task; (8) operator implementation goal tests and operator parallelism; (9) top-level variables and functions; (10) errors, warnings, and recovery hints; and (11) the installation of Soar. Also provided are a performance comparison of the time required to solve a simple problem in the Eight Puzzle on different Lisp systems in Version 4, release 1; a brief annotated Soar bibliography; and a distribution list for this report. Two appendices contain a list of search-control productions and a sunmary of functions and variables, and an index is provided. (KM) *********************************************************************** Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. ***********************************************************************