WeblogEliza (Weizenbaum 1966) is the first chatterbot -- a computer program that mimics human conversation. In only about 200 lines of computer code, Eliza models the behavior of a psychiatrist (or, more specifically, the "active listening" strategies of a touchy-feely 1960s Rogerian therapist).
Comment | Interaction | Transcripts | References
Interaction
You can sample Eliza by following the link to Charles Hayden's java Eliza "a complete and faithful implementation of the program described by Weizenbaum".There are scores of online Elizas. Some of them seem to modify Weizenbaum's original code without any notice (I was ready to use one of these versions as a classroom demo, until it started making rude remarks and referred to recent events the original 1960s program wouldn't have known about.
Transcripts
The program looks for simple grammatical structures and a small set of keywords, which include computers, family members, and emotions.
How
do you do. Please state your problem. |
The following transcript shows Eliza's limitations fairly clearly. The program recognized the text "I am", but proceeded as if the user had typed something like "I am happy." Since there was no word following "I am", Eliza's response "How long have you been ?" makes little sense.
How long have you been ? |
- How effective was Eliza when it first appeared?
Secretaries and nontechnical administrative staff thought the machine was a "real" therapist, and spent hours revealing their personal problems to the program. When Weizenbaum informed his secretary that he, of course, had access to the logs of all the conversations, she reacted with outrage at this invasion of her privacy. Weizenbaum was shocked by this and similar incidents to find that such a simple program could so easily deceive a naive user into revealing personal information. -- Richard S. Wallace, "From Eliza to A.L.I.C.E."
- Another amusing Eliza anecdote (firmly ensconced in computer folklore)
References
- Weizenbaum, Joseph. "ELIZA - A Computer Program for the Study of Natural Language Communication between Man and Machine," Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery 9 (1966): 36-45.
- Weizenbaum, Joseph. Computer power and human reason. San Francisco, CA: W.H. Freeman, 1976.
See also: Kenneth Colby's "Parry," a simulation of a paranoid schizophrenic.
- Colby, Kenneth M. et al. "Artificial paranoia." Artificial Intelligence 2 (1972): 1-26.
- Colby, Kenneth M. et al. "Turing-like undistinguishability tests for the validation of a computer simulation of paranoid processes." Artificial Intelligence 3 (1973): 47-51.
- ELIZA (Wikipedia)
| See Also |
| Games
Links
(Jerz's Literacy Weblog) |
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