I don't have the time to get involved in a big discussion board, but just in case nobody else replies I thought I'd send you a couple of sentences.
Soar at it's core is a pretty simple beast. It's a very high performance production rule system with built in support for goal hierarchies, operators and learning. This is placed within a strong theory of how to build and organize large complex AI systems. It represents all knowledge symbolically, which seems like a big difference from Novamente which appears to build in probabilistic reasoning at a more primitive level.
One of Soar's main strengths is its longevity--something of an existence proof for its value. It has been around for 20+ years now and still has a very active research community associated with it. It's been used in a vast range of different projects and has some very notable successes, such as systems used to control tactical fighter aircraft in large scale military simulations. There's also a company (http://www.soartech.com/) that is largely based around building AI systems using Soar.
In
evaluating it I'd say Soar's specialty is problems that require integrating large amounts of complex knowledge from multiple sources. If you're just trying to solve one specific problem (e.g. finding a best plan to get from A to B) then a general architecture isn't the best choice. You're better with a tool that does just the one thing you want--like a pure planner in that case. But if you're interested in integrating lots of knowledge together Soar is a good choice. I've not used Novamente so I can't say how well it stacks up. From a quick reading it seems like Novamente has perhaps more of a "bottom-up" approach to knowledge and reasoning as they talk about patterns emerging from the environmental data. That's a lot closer to the neural network/connectionist/GA school of thought than Soar which is more of a classic, top-down reasoning system with high level goals decomposed into steadily smaller
pieces.
Generally, the bottom-up pattern based systems do better at noisy pattern recognition problems (perception problems like recognizing letters in scanned OCR text or building complex perception-action graphs where the decisions are largely probabilistic like playing backgammon or assigning labels to chemical molecules). Top-down reasoning systems like Soar generally do better at higher level reasoning problems. Selecting the correct formation and movements for a squad of troops when clearing a building, or receiving English instructions from a human operator to guide a robot through a burning building.
I don't know if any of that helps and I may have misplaced Novamente in the scheme of things -- I've just scanned that work briefly.
Doug
(Former Soar researcher).
James Ratcliff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Yan,
I had heard of it, but had yet to read up on it, after breifly reading a bit here, the main pages, and the first tutorial, I am duly impressed with its abilities. Though leary of having to download and work with a large complex package it apepars to be.
Have you or anyone else downloaded and played with the application suite, or have any more insights into its working that we may compare contrast it with the Novamente project?
Ref Site: http://sitemaker.umich.edu/soar
I have also invited a person from Soar to join the discussion.
One goal of mine is to produce a very simplistic web interface, similar to the uses of Open Mind Common Sense, that is easy to get in, edit, and possibly use the agent, and add to the knowledge bases, and possibly open it up to a large section of the internet for supervised learning input.
James Ratcliff
Yan King Yin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On 7/12/06, James Ratcliff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> This is essential. If a long term plan would be made only formulated in terms of (very concrete) microlevel concepts there would be a near-infinity of possible plans, and plan descriptions would be enormously long, and would contain a lot of counterfactuals, because a lot of details are not known yet (causing another combinatiry explosion). If you wanted to go to Holland and made a plan like: move leg up, put hand on phone, turn left etc etc Planning would be unfeasible. Instead you make a more abstract plan, like: order ticket, go to airport, take plane, go to hotel. You formulate it on the right level of abstraction.
>
> And during the execution of the high level plan(go to Holland) it would cause more concrete plans (go to airport), that would cause more concrete plans(drive in car), and so on until the level of physical body movement is reached (step on brake). Each level of abstraction is tied to a certain time scale. A plan, and a prediction have a certain (natural) life time that is on the time scale of their level of abstraction.
>
> One thing I have been working on in these regards is the use of a 'script system'> [....]Hi James, have you looked at Soar? They seem to have focused on the issue of complex planning right from the beginning.Ben: If you have the time, I wish you can explain the key differences between Novamente and Soar. I'd be glad to work with Novamente if it has some nice features that Soar is unlikely to have in the (near or medium) future.YKY
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