ACT, Soar and other cognitive architectures
- Another bit of AI from the 80s (that is still evolving) is
systems that claim to do everything humans do, cognitive
architectures.
- The one I'm most familiar with is Soar, (Laird, Rosenbloom
and Newell).
- The reason they can get away with the bold statement is firstly,
they only mean cognition, secondly, they restrict cognition,
and finally, they say that the actual programs need to do be written.
- So, they are languages for writing cognition.
- So, if you write a program in the architecture, it is a
cognitive model.
- ACT (Anderson and Lebierre) is probably the big psychological
architecture. It's been used to argue against phoning while driving.
- There are lots of others, some quite good, for example Epic (Kieras
and Meyer). All three of these use production systems, but others
don't.
- It is relatively common to boldly claim that a system is a cognitive
architecture.
- For example, I've complained I have a proto-neuro-cognitive architecture.
- Also others claim that allocating process to different brain areas
is a cognitive architecture (and that is not consistent with the
above meaning).
