Artificial intelligence · 1970

SHRDLU

A program that understands English commands about a world of toy blocks.

Terry Winograd's SHRDLU could parse commands like 'find a block taller than the one you are holding', move blocks, and answer questions about its actions. It dazzled in its microworld but did not scale, a pattern that defined 1970s AI.

See it in the living tree Wikipedia

Arcs above join it to what it stood on, arcs below to what it led to. The bar places this stretch on the tree's whole timeline.

What it built on 2

ELIZA 1966
LISP 1958

Related measurements

The dashed line marks when it first worked.

Training compute of notable AI models Source: Epoch AI, Notable AI Models (CC BY 4.0)

Computation per constant dollar, 1850-2006 Latest: 7.3B million units of computer power per 2006 $ (2003) Source: Nordhaus 2007, Two Centuries of Productivity Growth in Computing, J. Econ. Hist. 67(1), Table 6