I said, 'She will respond based on some word you use, but she won't know those kinds of words.' One particularly memorable moment was when a student asked 'What happens if someone types in a curse word? ' That said, ELIZA delighted my students, and those who were in my little programming club at that time were also delighted to make their own versions by revising and adding to the code and scripts. By today's standards ELIZA fails very quickly if you ask it a few complex questions. 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. In this instance, the therapist 'reflects' on questions by turning the questions back at the patient.ĮLIZA was one of the first chatterbots (later clipped to chatbot). This was made to respond like a Rogerian psychotherapist. Perhaps the most well known variation was called DOCTOR. (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.

The program was limited by the scripts that were in the program. 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. But, when it was put on personal computers, humans found it quite engaging. It supposedly had been created to demonstrate how superficial human to computer communications was at that time. This early natural language processing program had been written in the mid-1960s at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory by Joseph Weizenbaum.

By then, ELIZA was a software tween herself. I first encountered ELIZA on the Tandy/Radio Shack computers that made up the first computer lab in the junior high school where I taught in the 1970s. Talk to Eliza by typing your questions and answers in the input box.

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