
Cornell Natural Language Visual Reasoning Dataset - indescions_2017
http://lic.nlp.cornell.edu/nlvr/
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z2
SHRDLU, anyone?
[http://hci.stanford.edu/winograd/shrdlu/](http://hci.stanford.edu/winograd/shrdlu/)

For almost 50 years, we've been talking to computers about blocks in a box!

~~~
romaniv
Pretty amazing.

It seems today people write off those demos as showy, shallow and misleadingly
optimistic. But if you think about it, the exact same thing can be said about
modern ML demonstrations. A lot of them hint at nearly human-level
intelligence, but that's often achieved through careful restriction on the
problem domain and by choosing the most successful examples.

Considering that old-school AI was operating on laughable hardware with tiny
hand-made datasets, with no crowd-sourcing options... I wonder, did attempts
to generalize some of that research fail because the approach was
fundamentally flawed, or was it because such efforts themselves weren't as
good as initial projects?

I mean, the article on Wikipedia talks about "more realistic level of
ambiguity and complexity", but the demonstrated domain is already more complex
than 90% of all programming problems I solve on day-to-day basis.

* * *

I though Minsky also did something similar, but with physical blocks and a
robotic arm, and without the NLP interface. Anyone knows about that? Or am I
making it up? I was looking for info about this recently and couldn't find
anything.

~~~
markan
If you're talking about human-level intelligence, I think you're on to
something. Old-fashioned AI was probably closer to the right track than we are
now.

> did attempts to generalize some of that research fail because the approach
> was fundamentally flawed, or was it because such efforts themselves weren't
> as good as initial projects?

In many cases there haven't _been_ attempts to follow up on that early work.
It's more like the zeitgeist just shifted to other things. For example, SHRDLU
was just a couple years before the first AI winter, and when spring came
(~1980) people had largely moved on. (Which isn't to say there weren't also
flaws with the approach.)

