6 ms·
SHRDLU (1971)
- Retr0spectrum 9y agoFor 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 9y agoThis 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
- ChuckMcM 9y agoWow 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 9y agoSo what was the problem? Why couldn't we add more and more more things to build it slowly into a more general AI?
- Sharlin 9y agoFor 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.
- anentropic 9y agoIf I recall... the complexity of the program/system scaled exponentially with the complexity of the universe it had to support. something like that
- xxr 9y agoThis 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/
- theoh 9y agoPreviously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8219409 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8219409
- phobius 9y agoThe 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 9y agoIndeed, 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]
- sgt101 9y agoLook 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
- gfredtech 9y agowhat makes Lisp dialects the ideal language for building GOFAI agents?
- ori_b 9y agoWith historical context: They had memory management, recursion, and higher order functions. None of these were common at the time.
- derefr 9y agoWould 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 9y agoHaving 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)
- YeGoblynQueenne 9y agoI think it was more about the way the lambda calculus encodes ideas from category theory and so on. GOFAI was all about using logic to achieve AI so languages like LISP (and, of course, logic programming languages like Prolog) were a natural choice for that sort of thing.
- cscheid 9y agoThe first person to make a connection between categories and programming was arguably Moggi, in 1991. That's 20 years after SHRDLU.
- YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
- bjackman 9y agoThis 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!
- eduren 9y agoWow, I saw this thread after just reading that chapter over lunch. My first time reading GEB and I'm absolutely captured.
- s_kilk 9y agoI'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.
- YeGoblynQueenne 9y agoBlimey. 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 9y agoYeah; I mean "does the shortest buffalo the tallest buffalo's buffalo buffalos buffalo anything buffalo?" sheesh! :)
- tasty_freeze 9y agoI 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.
- fgrimes 9y agoComputer: I UNDERSTAND.
- irascible 9y agoWhy hasn't someone ported this to the web with a nice animated front end?
- wazoox 9y agoTerry Winograd was my hero back then. I remember reading about him and SHRDLU back in 1977...