A mechanism or tactic · 1970 · First chatbots
SHRDLU
A conversational system about a small blocks world, capable of genuinely tracking a user's intentions. Famous for one demonstration and a broken follow-up.
The proof that machine understanding of intent was considered a solved research problem in 1970 and has been failing privately ever since. The person who made SHRDLU then said the problem was far harder than it looked, and was believed by nobody.
Consideration. The part where somebody stops and thinks. The research, the diagnosis, the ethics, the lawsuits, the regulators. Roughly fifty years of arguing with itself about whether this is a relationship.
Where it sits
1950 1950-1999 · 1970 1999
Provenance · 1 source record(s)
- retrievableThe principal published reference on SHRDLU, and the source of the two facts the entry turns on: that the system genuinely tracked a user's intentions in a blocks world, and that the demonstration's fame outran its coverage. Also the record of the date ambiguity - the thesis is 1970/1971 and this paper is 1972.Winograd, T. (1972). Understanding natural language. Cognitive Psychology, 3(1), 1-191. The principal reference on SHRDLU. The program itself was written 1968-1970 as Winograd's MIT PhD thesis, Procedures as a Representation for Data in a Computer Program for Understanding Natural Language, issued as MIT AI Memo 235 with a February 1971 date - so the corpus's '1970' named the thesis, not this paper. ↗
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