What Is a Cognitive Architecture?

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Paul Rosenbloom is Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at the University of Southern California. In the early 1980s, Paul , along with John Laird and the early AI pioneer Alan Newell, developed one the earliest and best know cognitive architectures called SOAR. A cognitive architecture, as Paul defines it, is a model of the fixed structures and processes underlying minds, and in Paul's case the human mind. And SOAR was aimed at generating general intelligence. He doesn't work on SOAR any more, although SOAR is still alive and well in the hands of his old partner John Laird. He did go on to develop another cognitive architecture, called Sigma, and in the intervening years between those projects, among other things Paul stepped back and explored how our various scientific domains are related, and how computing itself should be considered a great scientific domain. That's in his book On Computing: The Fourth Great Scientific Domain.

He also helped develop the Common Model of Cognition, which isn't a cognitive architecture itself, but instead a theoretical model meant to generate consensus regarding the minimal components for a human-like mind. The idea is roughly to create a shared language and framework among cognitive architecture researchers, so the field can , so that whatever cognitive architecture you work on, you have a basis to compare it to, and can communicate effectively among your peers.

All of what I just said, and much of what we discuss, can be found in Paul's memoir, In Search of Insight: My Life as an Architectural Explorer.

• Paul's website.
• Related papers
  • Working memoir: In Search of Insight: My Life as an Architectural Explorer.
  • Book: On Computing: The Fourth Great Scientific Domain.
  • A Standard Model of the Mind: Toward a Common Computational Framework across Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, and Robotics.
  • Analysis of the human connectome data supports the notion of a “Common Model of Cognition” for human and human-like intelligence across domains.
  • Common Model of Cognition Bulletin.

0:00 - Intro 3:26 - A career of exploration 7:00 - Alan Newell 14:47 - Relational model and dichotomic maps 24:22 - Cognitive architectures 28:31 - SOAR cognitive architecture 41:14 - Sigma cognitive architecture 43:58 - SOAR vs. Sigma 53:06 - Cognitive architecture community 55:31 - Common model of cognition 1:11:13 - What's missing from the common model 1:17:48 - Brains vs. cognitive architectures 1:21:22 - Mapping the common model onto the brain 1:24:50 - Deep learning 1:30:23 - AGI