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Related question: Does anyone have a working SHRDLU to play with? The original code has been posted but it's Maclisp, so it probably needs porting or emulation and a little packaging. Also, I think the (blocks world) visualization layer is somewhere else?

https://github.com/stuartpb/shrdlu




Like dTal says there's a java version and also a windows cmd version but neither seems to be very stable. In general, it's rather a bit sad, but it seems that Terry Winograd's original code is going to be very hard to run- and has been changed by at least one of his doctoral students anyway. It seems that Winograd had to make changes to the Lisp runtime to get SHRDLU running as he wanted it for his thesis, changes that were not entirely backported to the code of SHRDLU later:

[Dave McDonald] (davidmcdonald@alum.mit.edu) was Terry Winograd's first research student at MIT. Dave reports rewriting "a lot" of SHRDLU ("a combination of clean up and a couple of new ideas") along with Andee Rubin, Stu Card, and Jeff Hill. Some of Dave's interesting recollections are: "In the rush to get [SHRDLU] ready for his thesis defense [Terry] made some direct patches to the Lisp assembly code and never back propagated them to his Lisp source... We kept around the very program image that Terry constructed and used it whenever we could. As an image, [SHRDLU] couldn't keep up with the periodic changes to the ITS, and gradually more and more bit rot set in. One of the last times we used it we only got it to display a couple of lines. In the early days... that original image ran like a top and never broke. Our rewrite was equally so... The version we assembled circa 1972/1973 was utterly robust... Certainly a couple of dozen [copies of SHRDLU were distributed]. Somewhere in my basement is a file with all the request letters... I've got hard copy of all of the original that was Lisp source and of all our rewrites... SHRDLU was a special program. Even today its parser would be competitive as an architecture. For a recursive descent algorithm it had some clever means of jumping to anticipated alternative analyses rather than doing a standard backup. It defined the whole notion of procedural semantics (though Bill Woods tends to get the credit), and its grammar was the first instance of Systemic Functional Linguistics applied to language understanding and quite well done." Dave believes the hardest part of getting a complete SHRDLU to run again will be to fix the code in MicroPlanner since "the original MicroPlanner could not be maintained because it had hardwired some direct pointers into the state of ITS (as actual numbers!) and these 'magic numbers' were impossible to recreate circa 1977 when we approached Gerry Sussman about rewriting MicroPlanner in Conniver."

http://maf.directory/misc/shrdlu.html

Even the link to the account by Dave McDonald above, is itself subject to linkrot.


That's what I was hoping for, thank you. At least someone is trying to get it curated and working for the future.


Click "SHRDLU" in the linked page to go to its parent page, where you will ostensibly find a 3D version in Java (which I have not tested).




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