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SHRDLU (1971)

hci.stanford.edu

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Re: SHRDLU (1971)

#21

Post by Sharlin »

Darthy wrote: post #20
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?

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.

Re: SHRDLU (1971)

#22

Post by s_kilk »

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!

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.

Re: SHRDLU (1971)

#23

Post by anentropic »

Darthy wrote: post #20
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?

If I recall... the complexity of the program/system scaled exponentially with the complexity of the universe it had to support. something like that

Re: SHRDLU (1971)

#27

Post by paulrpotts »

derefr wrote: post #12
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.

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?

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)

Re: SHRDLU (1971)

#28

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

cscheid wrote: post #17
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not sure who Moggi is.

Category theory, the lambda calculus and the principle of compositionality were employed in linguistics since the 1930's, for instance with categorical grammar. I don't think we're talking about the same thing.

Re: SHRDLU (1971)

#29

Post by dirkt »

cscheid wrote: post #17
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, Eugenio Moggi realized that you can use Monads to represent IO etc. in languages like Haskell, and that was in the paper "Computational lambda-calculus and monads" (1989). The first person I can think of to make a connection between categories and lambda calculus is Joachim Lambek, in his paper "From lambda calculus to Cartesian closed categories" (1980).

Re: SHRDLU (1971)

#30

Post by dirkt »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #28
cscheid wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm not sure who Moggi is. Category theory, the lambda calculus and the principle of compositionality were employed in linguistics since the 1930's, for instance with categorical grammar. I don't think we're talking about the same thing.

What kind of Category Theory are you talking about? [Category Theory](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/category-theory/) in the mathematical sense, and in the sense that it can be used to describe Lambda Calculi, appeared in 1945, in the field of Algebraic Topology and Homological Algebra. I'd be really surprised if it was employed in linguistics in the 1930s.
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