The Tasking Operators

The PEACTIDM tasking operators are those which may appear as the top operator. In general, they modify a flag on the top state that reflects the current "task," a component of the domain model that helps decide which actions are appropriate or inappropriate at any given time. Allen describes these operators in the following way in Unified Theories of Cognition: "Tasking is the function of setting a task to be performed." (more)

In general, the result of a tasking operator is to add a ^new-task attribute to the top state. When this appears, the old ^task attribute is removed and the new task is put in its place (see code in generic.soar6). I am coming to believe that this information could as readily be encoded in the situation model or another comparable general purpose structure, rather than allocating it some sort of special status. But that's a theoretical issue... The tasking operators in NTD-Soar are:

Note that find-next-participation and follow-omi-procedure are actually unimplemented tasking operators, for which context-dependent implementations are eventually built, which can select any of a number of different tasks. new-task is used by spaces which are proposing new PEACTIDM operators from state no-changes. It's unclear whether learn-comprehension is a comprehension operator or a task operator, so it appears here as well. The tasks available to the NTD are: