| January 24 |
Overview of Course |
Assignment: Come to class. A few background pages on cognitive theories and Soar. |
| January 31 |
Setting up SOAR |
Assignment:Download Eaters, TankSoar and all six parts of the SOAR
tutorial from the
SOAR website.
Follow the link to Documentation to find the tutorial and the link to Downloads
to find the code. Read pages 1-19 of the first part of the tutorial.
Also, read pages 1-15 of this introductory paper, which students have found very helpful. The whole paper is good, but the pages after page 15 contain more detail than we need in the first two weeks. |
| February 7 |
Writing an Eater agent |
Assignment: Before class, read pages 46-63 of the tutorial while doing the
indicated programming. These pages are in the second part of the tutorial.
The calendar programs demonstrated in class are here. |
| February 14 |
Writing an Eater agent (continued) |
Assignment: Before class, read pages 64-84 of the tutorial while doing the
indicated programming. After class, write a simple eater that will follow the
wall, starting along the wall and in either direction. Then modify it to follow
the wall all the way around. Then modify it to stop where it started.
Email it to me by February 21.
There is a video on Human Consciousness and Computers in the Course Documents section of the Blackboard site for this course. |
| February 21 |
Writing an Eater agent (continued) |
Assignment: Before class, read pages 84-94 of the tutorial while doing the
indicated programming. After class, write an Eater that follows the outside walls
of the game, and explicity remembers which wall it is following. The Eater must
have an attribute attached to the state that indicates that it is following the
north wall, or the east wall, etc. Email it to me by February 28.
Here is the first eater for class, and here is the second eater.
Here is an eater from last year.
|
| February 28 |
Writing a more sophisticated agent using subgoals: Introduction to TankSoar
|
Assignment:
After class, begin writing your final eater, which
is one that will remember the locations of food it has seen, so that when it cannot
see any food to eat, it will move toward food it remembers. Email it to me by March 28.
And here is the file containing rules and operators for remembering and forgetting food on a stack. |
| March 6 |
Introduction to TankSoar (continued) |
Assignment:
Before class, read pages 95-114 of the tutorial. These pages
are in Part 3 of the tutorial.
|
| March 13 |
TankSoar(continued) |
Assignment:
Before class, read pages 115-135 of Part 3 of the tutorial while doing the
indicated programming.
Here is the simple version of the traveling task, and the lookahead version. And here is the Soar Coloring Book. Here is the simple sudoku agent. |
| March 27 |
TankSoar(continued) |
Assignment:
Before class, read pages 136-147 of Part 3 of the tutorial while doing the
indicated programming.
Select an advanced tank to program.
Also, continue to work on your final eater. Remember,
this eater should remember food that it has seen but not eaten, so that when
the eater is surrounded by empty space, it will move to remembered food.
Here are the proposal rules for the four strategies of the tank. |
| April 3 |
Group projects on TankSoar, and Introduction to Planning. |
Assignment:
Before class, read pages 142-159 in Part 4 of the tutorial.
|
| April 10 |
Planning (continued)
|
Assignment: Before class, read pages 20-45 of Part 1 of the tutorial and
pages 160-176 of Part 5 of the tutorial.
We'll examine a Soar poker-playing program. Here is the page on the poker program. |
| April 17 |
Search and planning (continued).
|
Assignment: Show up! Continue to work on the tanks and planning. Here are some little soar test files. Also, here is a paper on VMSoar. |
| April 24 |
A government-sponsored research project on network security using Soar will be presented.
Also, SoarRobot will be explained, followed by a demo of the robot. |
Assignment: Continue to work on the tanks. Email them when done. Here are the pages on the robot. |
| May 1 | No final exam in this course. |
Assignment: Continue to work on the final projects, which are due by May 9. |