Atlas orientation
How to use the atlas across the lecture sequence.
Course map
The atlas is the spine that keeps fourteen chapters from becoming fourteen isolated summaries.
Use it as a return point after each mechanism chapter: what architectural responsibility has been added, and what earlier responsibility did it depend on?
Unit map
The five teaching units and their role in the course.
| Unit | Chapters | Goal |
|---|---|---|
| Why architectures? | 1, 2 | Establish motivation, architectural requirements, and a reusable evaluation vocabulary. |
| Core Soar mechanism | 3, 4, 5 | Build the PSCM, map it onto Soar, and show how impasses turn blocked action into structured reasoning. |
| Learning and memory | 6, 7, 8, 9 | Compare procedural learning, value tuning, semantic knowledge, and episodic experience as interacting architectural resources. |
| Modality, affect, and integration | 10, 11, 12 | Track how Soar extends beyond symbolic control into imagery, emotion, and integrated demonstrations. |
| Application and synthesis | 13, 14 | Evaluate what applications prove and consolidate Soar's lessons against architectural requirements. |
Chapter index
Direct entry points into every generated lecture note.
Architecture responsibilities
What each major Soar subsystem contributes to the whole.
| Responsibility | Course chapters | Architectural question |
|---|---|---|
| Problem-space control | 3-5 | How does the agent represent progress, choice, and blocked choice? |
| Procedural learning | 6-7 | How does experience change future operator behavior? |
| Long-term memory | 8-9 | How does knowledge and experience return to current reasoning? |
| Modality and affect | 10-11 | How do imagery and emotion integrate with symbolic control? |
| Integration and evidence | 12-14 | What do demonstrations, applications, and requirements justify? |
Reading rhythm
A repeatable method for using the chapter notes.
Per-chapter study loop
- Read the reader action and thesis before opening the source chapter.
- Inspect the generated diagram and selected book figures.
- Read the mechanism section while checking source page anchors.
- Answer the tension questions before class.
- Complete the exercise and add one claim-evidence-limit row to the course matrix.
Diagram strategy
How book figures and generated figures divide responsibility.
Book figures
Use extracted figures for source fidelity.
They preserve what the book chose to visualize and should be cited with PDF page anchors.
Generated diagrams
Use created diagrams for lecture synthesis.
They clarify the mechanism sequence or architecture map without claiming to reproduce the book.
Diagram Foundry
Use as a quality bar and future export path.
The current generated SVGs follow the foundry's durable-figure principles; a later pass can promote repeated diagrams into Foundry creators.
Sources
Trace lecture claims to page anchors, extracted figures, and generated project files.
Reviewed sources
- Full Soar Markdown source
- 376 PDF pages with page anchors and extracted image references.
- Chapter 1 opening
- Course motivation and architecture frame.
- Chapter 14 conclusion
- Requirement synthesis and final architecture review.