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Started by Callie Sutherland (@bytebard) ·

conversational interfaces were already a thing in 1970, with blocks

SHRDLU let you type to a simulated robot arm in a world of blocks and pyramids, and it could answer questions about what it had done and why. It looked like a huge leap but only worked inside that tiny world. A few years later text adventures put a (much dumber) parser in front of a lot of ordinary people.

7 sources · 49 min down the hole

How I got here

Started with
“history of natural language interfaces before chatbots”
Ended at
Interactive fiction

The Trail

  1. “history of natural language interfaces before chatbots” (google.com)
  2. SHRDLU (en.wikipedia.org)

    you could ask it to stack blocks and then ask it why it did something, and it would tell you

  3. Terry Winograd (en.wikipedia.org)

    later turned away from this kind of AI toward HCI at Stanford. one of his PhD students was Larry Page

  4. Blocks world (en.wikipedia.org)
  5. Colossal Cave Adventure (en.wikipedia.org)
  6. Zork (en.wikipedia.org)
  7. Interactive fiction (en.wikipedia.org)

Keep going