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SHRDLU (1971)

hci.stanford.edu

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Re: SHRDLU (1971)

#11

Post by 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!

Re: SHRDLU (1971)

#12

Post by derefr »

ori_b wrote: post #10
gfredtech wrote: post #9

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

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

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?

Re: SHRDLU (1971)

#13

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

ori_b wrote: post #10
gfredtech wrote: post #9

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

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

I 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.

Re: SHRDLU (1971)

#14

Post by 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.

Re: SHRDLU (1971)

#15

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

pentaphobe wrote: post #7

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

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]

Re: SHRDLU (1971)

#16

Post by kazinator »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #14

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.

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

:)

Re: SHRDLU (1971)

#17

Post by cscheid »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #13
ori_b wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I 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.

The first person to make a connection between categories and programming was arguably Moggi, in 1991. That's 20 years after SHRDLU.

Re: SHRDLU (1971)

#18

Post by 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.

Re: SHRDLU (1971)

#19

Post by eduren »

bjackman wrote: post #11

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!

Wow, I saw this thread after just reading that chapter over lunch.

My first time reading GEB and I'm absolutely captured.

Re: SHRDLU (1971)

#20

Post by Darthy »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #3

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.

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