This project is a revival of Terry Winograd's famous SHRDLU computer language project. SHRDLU was a program meant to 'understand' language in a way that is not usually done any more. By giving SHRDLU knowledge of a limited domain of blocks, boxes, and pyramids, and grounding the symbols of its language with the 'objects' of its world, SHRDLU was able to have very sophisticated conversations about the things it knows about.
Sadly, SHRDLU was originally written in a now-dead dialect of Lisp. It was revived in the 1990s and ported to CLisp. (Read more about the 1990s SHRDLU resurrection at: http://www.semaphorecorp.com/misc/shrdlu.html)
This project (www-shrdlu) involved re-reviving that port, and adding a Javascript/3js graphics implementation of the renderer. This version was meant to run with an Apache load balancer for scalability, so it includes support for session keys, so that multiple users can use multiple instances of SHRDLU on the same machine. At its home machine at:
There are five instances running at one time, and that seems sufficient for now.
The 1990s revival of SHRDLU was not complete; important functionality that was documented in the 1970s did not survive. The current version vaguely resembles a SHRDLU that has had a stroke. By making the code available in a collaborative space like github, my hope is that people might be able to contribute to SHRDLU's rehabilitation, and to work on other enhancements for it.
Github's issue tracker for this repo is a good place to look for the list of problems and desired enhancements. I am happy to entertain pull requests from anyone who would like to contribute. The wiki and other collaboration features are still getting it together, so be patient.
Tom Sgouros June, 2014