John Laird explains that one approach in pursuit of general intelligent agents has been to concentrate on the underlying cognitive architecture, of which Soar is a prime example.

"Extending the Soar Cognitive Architecture," presented at the AGI-08 Conference, illustrates how in the past, Soar has relied on a minimal number of architectural modules together with purely symbolic representations of knowledge. The presentation illustrates the cognitive architecture approach to general intelligence and the traditional, symbolic Soar architecture, and highlights Soar's major additions: non- symbolic representations, new learning mechanisms, and long-term memories.