[HN Gopher] SHRDLU
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SHRDLU
Author : gattilorenz
Score : 96 points
Date : 2022-06-16 16:42 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (hci.stanford.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (hci.stanford.edu)
| pxeger1 wrote:
| I presume the title is related to the list of most frequently
| used letters in English, etaoinSHRDLUcmwfgypbvkjxqz?
| aasasd wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etaoin_shrdlu
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _How SHRDLU got its name (2003)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24102610 - Aug 2020 (16
| comments)
|
| _The SHR-DLU AI Natural Language Processing System (1970)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21880043 - Dec 2019 (1
| comment)
|
| _SHRDLU resurrection_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19138825 - Feb 2019 (4
| comments)
|
| _SHRDLU - a program for understanding natural language (1968)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17028731 - May 2018 (1
| comment)
|
| _SHRDLU (1971)_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14351485
| - May 2017 (30 comments)
|
| _Shrdlu resurrection - A 1970 artificial intelligence system_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8927043 - Jan 2015 (2
| comments)
|
| _SHRDLU_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8219409 - Aug
| 2014 (19 comments)
| drewda wrote:
| I think there's an interesting story to be told in how Winograd
| started with "pure AI" approaches to language understanding like
| SHRDLU, gave it up in frustration, and then helped to found the
| field of human-computer interaction.
|
| In some ways, HCI has much more modest and applied goals than AI.
| In other ways, HCI has had a much larger impact on many more
| computer users and developers in recent decades. Stanford's
| Symbolic Systems program effectively became the training ground
| for Google product managers and other consumer tech companies
| with strong UI/UX roles.
| imranq wrote:
| Also check out the Stanford NLU course about this topic:
| cs224u.stanford.edu
|
| There's a section on Shrdlu there too
| taneq wrote:
| Ah, back in the days when we thought AI was a Simple Matter Of
| Programming and that logic and analysis were fundamentally harder
| problems than perception, localisation, cognition and sentience
| (whatever that particular begged question even _means_ ).
|
| Just add a couple of feedback loops, if they're strange enough it
| might work.
|
| Edit: Fun fact, the Winograd Schema Challenge
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winograd_schema_challenge) is
| named after Terry Winograd, the author of SHRDLDU.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| The ability of SHRDLU to follow its user's instructions remains
| unsurpassed by modern systems.
| the_biot wrote:
| I recall some company or project in the late 70s or 80s putting
| together a massive database of concepts and how they relate to
| each other, i.e. a semantic word database. Wish I could
| remember the name, I know it's on wikipedia somewhere.
|
| I always thought the effort must have been related to code like
| this. This simple language interpreter can do lots of things,
| but only in its small world of boxes and pyramids. It follows
| that if you teach it a bunch of things and how they relate to
| each other, you'd create an intelligent computer.
|
| Instead that whole field was dropped, presumably because it
| didn't work, and eventually neural networks started to be
| thought of as the next generation of soon-to-be-AI systems. But
| it's pretty apparent by now that things like GPT-3 are hollow
| shells, good at emulating some very specific things humans can
| do, but there's nothing remotely like intelligence behind it.
|
| I wonder if in 20 years we'll look back at this as another dead
| end on the road to AI.
| JPLeRouzic wrote:
| There were also Thought Treasure. In some aspects it is
| similar, only a bit more modern (1990'):
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThoughtTreasure
| the_biot wrote:
| Projects like this one and Cyc really appeal to my inner
| hoarder and programmer both. It must be so satisfying (if
| pointless) to create datasets like this.
|
| But I suspect the next time somebody tackles a project like
| this it'll use natural language parsing to derive its
| dataset from all the world's written text, automatically.
| Wikipedia will tell you a pea is green, if you can read it.
| handojin wrote:
| Cyc? It's still a going concern - www.cyc.com
| drewda wrote:
| Every decade or so I wonder what's up with that effort.
|
| Doug Lenat left Stanford and moved to Texas to focus on
| Cyc... and I always wonder when he'll return triumphantly
| to Silicon Valley with a "100% complete" knowledge base in
| hand :)
| the_biot wrote:
| Yup, I think that's it.
| pde3 wrote:
| And then check out this very cool project from six years ago,
| which uses a block-stacking game inspired by Shrdlu but learns
| whatever language you choose to teach it instructions with :)
| https://shrdlurn.sidaw.xyz/
| sema4hacker wrote:
| Winograd copied some of his page from the original resurrection
| page now at
| https://sites.google.com/site/masteraddressfile/misc/shrdlu
| gattilorenz wrote:
| I recently got the Java version running under Windows XP, upped a
| bit the size of the window and posted a demo interaction:
| https://youtu.be/lzz3qUawahg
|
| The text-only system contains the original code partially
| converted from MacLisp to GNU CLisp, and runs (albeit with an
| error that can be skipped) in a modern CLisp version. But it's
| still buggy[1] and sometimes hangs, it would be great if someone
| could set up a containerized MacLisp version on a PDP6 emulator.
|
| [1] SHRDLU was never per se robust, but in this case there are
| clearly bugs from the conversion
| rjsw wrote:
| It should be fairly easy to get the original code working in
| the MIT CADR emulator, could even add a GUI.
| DonaldFisk wrote:
| It was written in 1970, in an early version of MACLISP, to
| run on an early version of ITS. It would require a fair
| amount of work to port the code to Lisp Machine Lisp so that
| it could run on the CADR emulator.
| jasfi wrote:
| If nothing else the program inspired people to think about AI and
| NLP. I'm working on Natural Language Understanding (NLU) myself
| (https://lxagi.com/).
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