SHRDLU

SHRDLU is a program for understanding natural language, written by Terry Winograd at the M.I.T. Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1968-70. SHRDLU carried on a simple dialog (via teletype) with a user, about a small world of objects (the BLOCKS world) shown on an early display screen (DEC-340 attached to a PDP-6 computer).

SHRDLU is described in Winograd's dissertation, which was issued as MIT AI Technical Report 235, February 1971 with the title Procedures as a Representation for Data in a Computer Program for Understanding Natural Language It was published as a full issue of the journal Cognitive Psychology Vol. 3 No 1, 1972, and as a book, Understanding Natural Language (Academic Press, 1972).

SHRDLU was written in MacLisp for the ITS system, vintage 1970. The source code is available at http://hci.stanford.edu/winograd/shrdlu/code and as a TAR file at http://hci.stanford.edu/winograd/shrdlu/code.tar .A discussion of various efforts is on the SHRDLU is at http://www.semaphorecorp.com/misc/shrdlu.html

You can download a Windows text-only console version of SHRDLU implemented in Common Lisp, or a graphical 3-D version implemented with an extra Java layer. Source code is included. These files were supplied by Greg Sharp, and were produced by the UMR student project to resurrect SHRDLU. Double-click the SHRDLU.BAT file in either version to start running. No guarantees.

If you have other questions, contact Terry Winograd <winograd@cs.stanford.edu>. You can also see the story of how SHRDLU got its name.

See more about shrdlu at Wikipedia



Original screen display Later color rendering (Univ. of Utah)

The dialog that was used as a SHRDLU demo: