SHRDLU

Later additions were made at the computer graphics labs at the University of Utah, adding a full 3D rendering of SHRDLU's "world".

One was that SHRDLU's world is so simple that the entire set of objects and locations could be described by including as few as perhaps 50 words: nouns like "block" and "cone", verbs like "place on" and "move to", and adjectives like "big" and "blue".

The possible combinations of these basic language building blocks are quite simple, and the program is fairly adept at figuring out what the user means.

SHRDLU can search back further through the interactions to find the proper context in most cases when additional adjectives were supplied.

This led other AI researchers to excessive optimism which was soon lost when later systems attempted to deal with situations with a more realistic level of ambiguity and complexity[citation needed].

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.