14 Facts About ELIZA

ELIZA is an early natural language processing computer program created from 1964 to 1966 at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory by Joseph Weizenbaum.

Surprisingly, the original ELIZA source-code has been missing since the 1960s as it was not common to publish articles that included source code at this time.

Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA, running the DOCTOR script, was created to provide a parody of "the responses of a non-directional psychotherapist in an initial psychiatric interview" and to "demonstrate that the communication between man and machine was superficial".

ELIZA itself examined the text for keywords, applied values to said keywords, and transformed the input into an output; the script that ELIZA ran determined the keywords, set the values of keywords, and set the rules of transformation for the output.

However, unlike in Shaw's play, ELIZA is incapable of learning new patterns of speech or new words through interaction alone.

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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.

However, this required ELIZA to have a script of instructions on how to respond to inputs from users.

ELIZA starts its process of responding to an input by a user by first examining the text input for a "keyword".

From this reassembly, ELIZA then sends the constructed sentence to the user in the form of text on the screen.

One solution was to have ELIZA respond with a remark that lacked content, such as "I see" or "Please go on".

Lisp version of ELIZA, based on Weizenbaum's CACM paper, was written shortly after that paper's publication, by Bernie Cosell.

ELIZA influenced a number of early computer games by demonstrating additional kinds of interface designs.

ELIZA is given credit as additional vocals on track 10 of the eponymous Information Society album.

ELIZA has been referenced in popular culture and continues to be a source of inspiration for programmers and developers focused on artificial intelligence.