Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The TacAir-Soar system is a computer program that generates human-like behavior flying simulated aircraft in tactical air combat training scenarios. The design of the system has been driven by functional concerns, allowing the system to generate a wide range of appropriate behaviors in severely time-limited situations. The combination of constraints from the complexity and dynamics of the domain with the overall goal of human-like behavior led to a system that can be viewed as a model of cognition for high-level, complex tasks. This paper analyzes the system in such a light, and describes how the functional design constraints map on to cognitively plausible representations and mechanisms, sometimes in surprising ways.