SHRD2

I was talking with some people about Terry Winograd's book Understanding Natural Language, and how inspiring I found the SHRDLU system when I first read about it as an undergraduate. They asked me what the current equivalent would be. It bothered me that I couldn't come up with anything, and that no one really seemed to be building this kind of system any more.

Well... so why not do something about it? Stage 1 is to build a speech-enabled, and hopefully rather more robust reconstruction of SHRDLU, using Regulus. Some initial stuff is already checked in under $REGULUS/Examples/SHRD2. When we've satisfied ourselves that we can handle the Blocks World, Stage 2 will be to define a new and more ambitious domain - something which will hopefully demonstrate that there has in fact been significant progress since the 70s.

I'll be posting more about this soon. So far, SHRD2 has already turned up some important holes in the general English grammar, which I'm working on fixing.