The Eliza stories
Barry Pain
ELIZA is an early natural language processing computer program created from 1964 to 1966[1] at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory by Joseph Weizenbaum.[2] Created to demonstrate the superficiality of communication between humans and machines, Eliza simulated conversation by using a 'pattern matching' and substitution methodology that gave users an illusion of understanding on the part of the program, but had no built in framework for contextualizing events.[3] Directives on how to interact were provided by 'scripts', written originally in MAD-Slip, which allowed ELIZA to process user inputs and engage in discourse following the rules and directions of the script. The most famous script, DOCTOR, simulated a Rogerian psychotherapist and used rules, dictated in the script, to respond with non-directional questions to user inputs. As such, ELIZA was one of the first chatterbots and one of the first programs capable of attempting the Turing Test.ELIZA creator, Weizenbaum regarded the program as a method to show the superficiality of communication between man and machine, but was surprised by the number of individuals who attributed human-like feelings to the computer program, including Weizenbaum’s secretary.[2] Many academics believed that the program would be able to positively influence the lives of many people, particularly those suffering from psychological issues and that it could aid doctors working on such patients' treatment.[2][4] While ELIZA was capable of engaging in discourse, ELIZA could not converse with true understanding.[5] However, many early users were convinced of ELIZA’s intelligence and understanding, despite Weizenbaum’s insistence to the contrary.Weizenbaum named his program ELIZA after Eliza Doolittle, a working-class character in George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion. According to Weizenbaum, ELIZA's ability to be "incrementally improved" by various users made it similar to Eliza Doolittle,[6] since Eliza Doolittle was taught to speak with an upper-class accent in Shaw's play.[10] However, unlike in Shaw's play, ELIZA is incapable of learning new patterns of speech or new words through interaction alone. Edits must be made directly to ELIZA’s active script in order to change the manner by which the program operates.Weizenbaum first implemented ELIZA in his own SLIP list-processing language, where, depending upon the initial entries by the user, the illusion of human intelligence could appear, or be dispelled through several interchanges. Some of ELIZA's responses were so convincing that Weizenbaum and several others have anecdotes of users becoming emotionally attached to the program, occasionally forgetting that they were conversing with a computer.[2] Weizenbaum's own secretary reportedly asked Weizenbaum to leave the room so that she and ELIZA could have a real conversation. Weizenbaum was surprised by this, later writing, "I had not realized ... that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people."[11]In 1966, interactive computing (via a teletype) was new. It was 15 years before the personal computer became familiar to the general public, and three decades before most people encountered attempts at natural language processing in Internet services like Ask.com or PC help systems such as Microsoft Office Clippit. Although those programs included years of research and work, ELIZA remains a milestone simply because it was the first time a programmer had attempted such a human-machine interaction with the goal of creating the illusion (however brief) of human-human interaction.[citation needed]At the ICCC 1972 ELIZA met another early artificial intelligence program named PARRY and had a computer-only conversation. While ELIZA was built to be a "Doctor" PARRY was intended to simulate a patient with schizophrenia.[12]
