
SHRDLU (1971) - panic
http://hci.stanford.edu/winograd/shrdlu/
======
ChuckMcM
Wow that brings back the memories. I remember when it first came out it seemed
like such a small step from having a system that could converse about a
simplified universe to one that could converse about a much closer to "real"
universe. And here we are with computers that are literally over a million
times more powerful and nope, still can't ask Alexa or Google home where you
left the car keys.

~~~
Darthy
So what was the problem? Why couldn't we add more and more more things to
build it slowly into a more general AI?

~~~
Sharlin
For the same reason we still need classical physics and chemistry and biology
and psychology and sociology even though in principle it should be possible to
model everything _ab initio_ with just quantum mechanics. In practice we can
just barely do that with single molecules before the complexity grows
insurmountable.

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Retr0spectrum
For anyone wondering, I assume the name is a reference to the frequency
distribution of english characters - when sorted by average frequency, you get
"ETAOINSHRDLU..."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etaoin_shrdlu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etaoin_shrdlu)

~~~
mipmap04
This is pretty much correct. It has to do with linotype keyboard[0].

[http://hci.stanford.edu/winograd/shrdlu/name.html](http://hci.stanford.edu/winograd/shrdlu/name.html)

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YeGoblynQueenne
Blimey. This bit is hardcore:

    
    
        Person: DOES THE SHORTEST THING THE TALLEST PYRAMID'S SUPPORT SUPPORTS SUPPORT ANYTHING GREEN? 
        Computer: YES, THE GREEN PYRAMID. 
        Person: WHAT COLOR IS IT? 
        Computer: BY "IT", I ASSUME YOU MEAN THE SHORTEST THING THE TALLEST PYRAMID'S SUPPORT SUPPORTS. 
        Computer: RED 
    

_I_ got confused by the instruction. That's ...it's hardcore.

~~~
kazinator
Yeah; I mean "does the shortest buffalo the tallest buffalo's buffalo buffalos
buffalo anything buffalo?" sheesh!

:)

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bjackman
This program is discussed amongst a whirlwind of beautiful insight in Douglas
Hofstadter's "Gödel, Escher Bach". I doubt I'm in the first 1,000 people to
recommend that book on HN but I think it would be remiss to have a thread
about SHRDLU without it being mentioned!

~~~
s_kilk
I've just finished my first read of GEB last night, and was delighted to see
this thread pop up :)

Great book, essential reading for anyone involved in Programming and/or Comp
Sci.

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phobius
The first AI to really blow my mind as a kid and - between that and Conway's
Game of Life - no doubt responsible for the first 5 years of obsessive my all-
night hacking and sneaking into university libraries to supplement lackluster
CS education in high school at the time.

Person: WHY DID YOU DO THAT?

Computer: BECAUSE YOU ASKED ME TO.

^ cue adolescent nerd frothing at mouth

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
Indeed, we have come a long way since then. Today, explanation in AI systems
works a lot better:

    
    
      Person: WHY DID YOU DO THAT?
      Computer: [low-level fan noise]

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tasty_freeze
I remember watching SHRDLU being demonstrated on a NOVA TV program 30+ years
ago. At the time I was program in BASIC on a microcomputer-class machine, and
it completely blew my mind that someone had created a program that could parse
and reason that well.

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sgt101
Look at Rosie - from the other coast, but a spiritual successor at least

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCf5R6KZ2JDZKjR2-CjgCnEw](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCf5R6KZ2JDZKjR2-CjgCnEw)

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xxr
This reminds me a lot of WordsEye[1], but not even WordsEye lets the human
user interrogate the machine about the created environment using natural
language.

[1] [https://www.wordseye.com/](https://www.wordseye.com/)

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theoh
Previously:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8219409](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8219409)

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wazoox
Terry Winograd was my hero back then. I remember reading about him and SHRDLU
back in 1977...

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gfredtech
what makes Lisp dialects the ideal language for building GOFAI agents?

~~~
ori_b
With historical context: They had memory management, recursion, and higher
order functions. None of these were common at the time.

~~~
derefr
Would a modern Prolog (those things + automatic backtracking) or Erlang (those
things + cheap actors) have been seen as even better for such purposes, if
they had had it at the time?

~~~
paulrpotts
Having looked at the source for SHRDLU (which I found very hard to understand
without more context), I think a lot of it was in an early version of Prolog,
"Micro-Planner."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planner_(programming_language)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planner_\(programming_language\))

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fgrimes
Computer: I UNDERSTAND.

