  This paper is the recommended initial reading for a functional overview of
Soar, version 9.6. It includes an abstract overview of the architectural
structure of Soar including its processing, memories, learning modules, their
interfaces, and the representations of knowledge used by those modules. From
there it describes the processing supported by those modules, including
decision making, impasses and substates, procedure learning via chunking,
reinforcement learning, semantic memory, episodic memory, and spatial-visual
reasoning. It then reviews the levels of decision making and variety of
learning in Soar, and analysis of Soar as an architecture supporting general
human-level AI. Following the references is an appendix that contains short
descriptions of recent Soar agents and a glossary of the terminology we use in
describing Soar.
