An Introduction to the Herbal Viewer Spice Up Your Soar Programming With Herbal! Presented by Mark Cohen Instructor at Lock Haven University Software created by Mark Cohen and Isaac Council

Purpose ● Herbal makes it easier to understand running models of Soar – Visual displays of working memory, and the PSCM task structure. – Dynamic trace views that track the history and frequency of events. – Displays that profile a running model.

Herbal is Flexible ● Herbal will work with all Soar models. Nothing has to be done to the model for it to work with Herbal! ● Herbal allows for the replay of previous model sessions without the need to run Soar. ● Although currently designed to work with Soar, Herbal can be extended to work with many cognitive architectures, as long as the architecture is based on the PSCM.

Architecture ● Herbal – Written in Java. – Uses the VISTA library to listen for event strings over a TCP/IP socket. ● Soar Monitors – A collection of Soar event monitors (productions) that fire on queue and call functions located in the Tcl Script. ● Tcl Script – Responds to Soar events by sending event strings to Herbal, over a socket. Herbal Soar VISTA Tcl Script Soar Events Soar Monitors

VISTA ● “The Visualization Toolkit for Agents” (VISTA), developed by Soar Technology Inc. ● Facilitates the creation of agent visualization applications by providing an infrastructure for communication between agents and VISTA enabled applications. ● Using a communication channel, agents can convey changes to their internal state to a listening VISTA enabled application. ● The VISTA toolkit also provides the ability to record and playback agent activity. ● By using VISTA as the infrastructure for communication between the cognitive architecture and Herbal, a significant amount of development time was saved. *VISTA Developer’s Handbook, Soar Technology Inc., 2002.

The Tree and Graph View

The History and Frequency Traces

The Commentary and Command View

Getting Started ● To get started using Herbal: – Download the Herbal JAR file and the Herbal-Soar interface script from – Run Soar and load the model you would like to view with Herbal. – Load the Herbal-Soar interface script into Soar. – Double click on the Herbal JAR file. This will launch Herbal and prompt you to enter the host and port. Accept the default settings by clicking on OK. – Run the model from Soar and watch Herbal in action! – Questions and feedback are welcome at: