ELIZA
ELIZA is an early natural language processing computer program developed from 1964 to 1967 at MIT by Joseph Weizenbaum.
Initial release date: 1966 | Developer: Joseph Weizenbaum | This javascript version of ELIZA was originally written by Michael Wallace and enhanced by George Dunlop.

Advance Media Representational Information Technologies - AMRIT. © 2024 amrit-corp.com

Eliza's main purpose was to demonstrate the superficiality of communication between humans and machines. Despite its simplicity, Eliza often managed to elicit responses from users that suggested they were engaging with a real human therapist. It played a significant role in the development of natural language processing and artificial intelligence, influencing subsequent chatbot designs and research in human-computer interaction. This early natural language processing program had been written in the mid-1960s at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory by Joseph Weizenbaum.

WHAT DOES ELIZA DO?
Using "'pattern matching" and substitution methodology, the program gives canned responses that made early users feel they were talking to someone who understood their input. The program was limited by the scripts that were in the program. (ELIZA was originally written in MAD-Slip.) Many variations on the original scripts were made as amateur coders played around with the fairly simple code.

Perhaps the most well known variation was called DOCTOR. This was made to respond like a Rogerian psychotherapist. In this instance, the therapist "reflects" on questions by turning the questions back at the patient.

ELIZA was one of the first chatterbots (later clipped to chatbot). It was also an early test case for the Turing Test, a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. By today's standards ELIZA fails very quickly if you ask it a few complex questions.

Give ELIZA a try. You can sit on your own couch and pretend it is a therapist's couch. And, as with Siri, Alexa and other operating system disembodied voices, feel free to conjure up your own idea of what ELIZA looks like.