Editing SHRDLU (section)

==Consequences==
SHRDLU was considered a tremendously successful demonstration of [[artificial intelligence]] (AI). This led other AI researchers to excessive optimism [[AI winter|which was soon lost]] when later systems attempted to deal with situations with a more realistic level of ambiguity and complexity{{Citation needed|date=June 2020|reason="Excessive optimism" may be true, but should be cited}}. Subsequent efforts of the SHRDLU type, such as [[Cyc]], have tended to focus on providing the program with considerably more information from which it can draw conclusions.

In a 1991 interview, Winograd said about SHRDLU:<ref>{{cite web|url=https://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/11299/107717|title=Oral history interview with Terry Allen Winograd|publisher=Charles Babbage Institute|date=1991-12-11|hdl=11299/107717}}</ref>
{{Blockquote
|text=[...] the famous dialogue with SHRDLU where you could pick up a block, and so on, I very carefully worked through, line by line. If you sat down in front of it, and asked it a question that wasn't in the dialogue, there was some probability it would answer it. I mean, if it was reasonably close to one of the questions that was there in form and in content, it would probably get it. But there was no attempt to get it to the point where you could actually hand it to somebody and they could use it to move blocks around. And there was no pressure for that whatsoever. Pressure was for something you could demo. Take a recent example, [[Nicholas Negroponte|Negroponte]]'s [[MIT Media Lab|Media Lab]], where instead of "[[Publish or perish|perish or publish]]" it's "demo or die." I think that's a problem. I think AI suffered from that a lot, because it led to "[[Potemkin village]]s", things which - for the things they actually did in the demo looked good, but when you looked behind that there wasn't enough structure to make it really work more generally. 
}}

Though not intentionally developed as such, SHRDLU is considered the first known formal example of [[interactive fiction]], as the user interacts with simple commands to move objects around a virtual environment, though lacking the distinct story-telling normally present in the interactive fiction genre. The 1976-1977 game ''[[Colossal Cave Adventure]]'' is broadly considered to be the first true work of interactive fiction.<ref>{{cite book | last = Montfort | first = Nick | year = 2003 | title = Twisty Little Passages: An Approach To Interactive Fiction | publisher = Cambridge: The MIT Press | isbn = 0-262-13436-5| pages = 84–85 | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=XiJFORKEm0oC&q=SHRDLU}}</ref>