Expert System Reasoning in Soar

Expert System Reasoning in Soar

Soar has been applied to a computer configuration task that was also a problem for the expert system R1. R1-Soar does a large part of the configuration task, but in a different way from R1. R1 has what is called a shallow structure. It is given rules about what to do in a particular situation but little ability to reason about the task. R1-Soar, on the other hand, has deep structure. It has a set of basic problem spaces in which to carry out basic tasks and knowledge about the underlying constraints -- this formed the deep structure. Since the system included no heuristic knowledge, R1-Soar was designed to search in the problem spaces for a particular solution rather than move directly to a solution as in R1. However, as Soar learned in this domain (with within-trial and across-trial transfer), it exhibited a significant increase in performance, approximating that of R1 for the part of R1 that R1-Soar was designed to cover. This application of Soar to an expert-systems task demonstrated three things about Soar empirically that were predicted by the structure of its architecture:
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