Soar: Motivating Hypotheses

• Physical Symbol System Hypothesis

  A general intelligence must be realized with a symbol system.

• Goal Structure Hypothesis

  Control in a general intelligence is maintained by a symbolic goal system.

• Uniform Elementary-Representation Hypothesis

  There is a single, elementary, uniform representation for declarative knowledge.

• Problem Space Hypothesis

  Problem spaces are the fundamental organizational unit of all goal-directed behavior.

• Production System Hypothesis

  Production systems are the appropriate organization for encoding all long-term knowledge.

• Universal-subgoaling Hypothesis

  Any decision can be an object of goal-oriented attention.

• Automatic-subgoaling hypothesis

  All goals arise dynamically in response to impasses and are generated automatically by the architecture.

• Control-knowledge Hypothesis

  Any decision can be controlled by indefinite amounts of knowledge, both domain dependent and independent.

• Weak-method Hypothesis

  The weak-methods form the basic methods of intelligence.

• Weak-method Emergence Hypothesis

  The weak methods arise directly from the system response, based on its knowledge of the task.

• Uniform-learning Hypothesis

  Goal-based chunking is the general learning mechanism.