SHRDLU was very impressive by any standards. It was released in the very early 1970s, when computers had only a few kilobytes of memory. Fortran was only about 15 years old. People had only just started to program. And then using paper tape.
SHRDLU took a number of preexisting ideas about language processing and planning and combines them beautifully. And SHRDLU really did understand its tiny world of logical blocks.
Given how much had been achieved in the decade prior to SHRDLU it was entirely reasonable to assume that real intelligence would be achieved in the relatively near future. Which is, of course, the point of the article.
(Winograd did cheat a bit by using Lisp. Today such a program would need to be written in C++ or possibly Java which takes much longer. Progress is not unidirectional.)
SHRDLU was very impressive by any standards. It was released in the very early 1970s, when computers had only a few kilobytes of memory. Fortran was only about 15 years old. People had only just started to program. And then using paper tape.
SHRDLU took a number of preexisting ideas about language processing and planning and combines them beautifully. And SHRDLU really did understand its tiny world of logical blocks.
Given how much had been achieved in the decade prior to SHRDLU it was entirely reasonable to assume that real intelligence would be achieved in the relatively near future. Which is, of course, the point of the article.
(Winograd did cheat a bit by using Lisp. Today such a program would need to be written in C++ or possibly Java which takes much longer. Progress is not unidirectional.)