Aswin F. van Woudenberg

Terry Winograd’s SHRDLU is a well known system that generates and understands natural language refering to objects and actions in a simple blocks world. It was written at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1968-70 in MACLISP for the Incompatible Time Sharing System.

Project SHRDLU is an attempt at the University of Missouri-Rolla to breath new life into the classic AI program by porting it from MACLISP to Common LISP. Besides porting the LISP code, a graphical 3D Java layer was also created.

I took this 3D Java layer and hacked together some extra code to turn it into a server program listening on port 8008. Then I wrote some Prolog code to act as a client to be able to send commands to the server program from prolog like this:

:- sendcommands([move(300,500,200), grasp('B3'), move(500, 600, 200), ungrasp('B3')]).

I wrote this code, because last year I programmed a small chatbot in Prolog and I plan to incorporate the blocks world code in my chatbot program. 

Let me know if you do anything useful with it or make improvements.