Joseph Weizenbaum's Original Eliza | Hacker News Reader

Joseph Weizenbaum's Original Eliza

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92 pointstobr20 comments

From [1]:

Weizenbaum was shocked to discover that many users were taking his program seriously and were opening their hearts to it. The experience prompted him to think philosophically about the implications of artificial intelligence and, later, to become a critic of it.

In his 1976 book, "Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation," Weizenbaum suggested that it could be both dangerous and immoral to assume computers could eventually take over any role, given enough processing power and the right programming.

"No other organism, and certainly no computer, can be made to confront genuine human problems in human terms," he wrote.

[1] - https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-mar-14-me-weize...

I wrote a different program called SAM - Simulated Artificial Mentality.

It looked for common strings inside a sentence and responded with one of 5 random choose sentences. It had the ability to add new sentences as it was used so over time it got better and better.

What got me was that it was less than 100 lines of BASIC code, yet I had people spending over an hour typing with it. And one girl was in tears as she was busy with it talking about her breakup with her boy friend.

Note the database of answers was over 2000 questions, I think I still have the paper tape with the original program even.

McCarthy thought Weizenbaum was a crank:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1045264.1045265

"This moralistic and incoherent book uses computer science and technology as an illustration to support the view promoted by Lewis Mumford, Theodore Roszak, and Jacques Ellul, that science has led to an immoral view of man and the world. I am frightened by its arguments that certain research should not be done if it is based on or might result in an "obscene" picture of the world and man. Worse yet, the book's notion of "obscenity" is vague enough to admit arbitrary interpretations by activist bureaucrats."

hah point 6 in their review is interesting.

>It seems exceedingly unlikely that the v e r y difficult problems of intelligence can be solved by "hackers" without a deep theory.

Guess they were very wrong.

I can’t tell if you’re joking. If not, what very difficult problem of intelligence have hackers solved? (Of course, I can weasel out by just redefining “very difficult” no matter what you say. :-)

I was infatuated with Eliza as a kid, thanks to its inclusion in David Ahl's "More BASIC Computer Games". It was my first foray into modifying someone else's code and trying to figure out how it worked. Something about this program was like jet fuel for my young imagination. The author of this article and founder of elizagen.org is Jeff Shrager, who was the first to convert Eliza from LISP to BASIC.

https://www.atariarchives.org/morebasicgames/showpage.php?pa...

It seems like so many people got their start with that book.

Jeff Shrager who is the author of the ELIZA code in the book is the person who created ELIZAGen and tracked down the original code.

Recently, David Ahl wrote: "After Eliza was published in Creative Computing in 1977, we reprinted it in my second games book, 'More Basic Computer Games', first published in June 1979. Between the magazine and book sales, that put about a quarter million copies of Eliza in people's hands. My games books were translated into Japanese, German, Dutch, and some other languages, which really spread it out. Not long after Eliza's appearance (as was true with most of our "interesting" programs) we started getting requests to convert it to other versions of BASIC and also to other languages. I routinely approved these requests and after Ziff-Davis shuttered the magazine in December 1985, I put everything in the public domain. My whole vision then and now was to improve and expand education in any way I can."

If you want to learn about the Eliza program from a podcast, the author of this website was one the Corecursive podcast recently: https://corecursive.com/eliza-with-jeff-shrager/

Podcast host here. Thanks for sharing!

The whole episode is sort of the back story of ELIZA and ELIZAGen effort.

There’s a fun list of minor errata to the podcast there as well.

Clarification, the errata for the podcast is on the ELIZAGen.Org site on the "Original ELIZA" page.

Eliza really hits a sweet spot of 'often quite good conversation' from very simple code. There's a C# version here: https://github.com/sirkris/ELIZA.NET

Main class that does processing is interesting to look at:

https://github.com/sirkris/ELIZA.NET/blob/master/src/ELIZA.N...

Main script file data structure:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sirkris/ELIZA.NET/master/s...

There's a few other nuts and bolts but thats basically it

I have modernized Charles Hayden's Java port a bit a while ago (much of the code is string/text processing that can be simplified a lot by using library functions)

https://github.com/stefanhaustein/eliza/tree/main/modernized...

There's a Go port available over gRPC (and gRPC-Web, and the Connect RPC protocol) at https://demo.connect.build. The code (as well as sample clients) are at https://github.com/bufbuild/connect-demo. You can also talk to our Eliza implementation with cURL:

curl --header 'Content-Type: application/json' --data '{"sentence": "I feel happy."}' https://demo.connect.build/buf.connect.demo.eliza.v1.ElizaSe...

I love that this little bit of computing history is getting some love :)

In the 80s I integrated Eliza into a bot that would play an online, multiplayer (up to 16!) text adventure game that was hosted locally via dialup. Sometimes I would come home from school and someone would be talking to it in the chat room.

Loved the article in Scientific American ("Artificial insanity: When a schizophrenic program meets a computerized analyst.") when Eliza met Racter.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/24967539 (Sadly only a preview, I can't find the whole article freely online.)

The Parry-Eliza conversation, mentioned in the podcast, is actually an RFC: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc439

Now if they could only find the seduction script written for the same engine. That seems to have been lost.

How did I not know this got open-sourced 6 months ago (!) ??

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