https://sites.google.com/view/elizagen-org/#h.rle1hgawpigd

[                    ]
Search this site
Skip to main content
Skip to navigation
ELIZAGEN

  * About
  * 
    Blog
      + The Mystery of ELIZA's Teachability
      + ELIZA is Turing Complete
      + SpotTheBot
      + A Code-Based ELIZA Phylogeny
  * The Original ELIZA
  * Commonly Known ELIZA Clones
  * Try an ELIZA
  * Other ELIZA-like Programs
  * News
  * ELIZA-Related Resources

ELIZAGEN

  * About
  * Blog
      + The Mystery of ELIZA's Teachability
      + ELIZA is Turing Complete
      + SpotTheBot
      + A Code-Based ELIZA Phylogeny
  * The Original ELIZA
  * Commonly Known ELIZA Clones
  * Try an ELIZA
  * Other ELIZA-like Programs
  * News
  * ELIZA-Related Resources
  * More
      + About
      + 
        Blog
          o The Mystery of ELIZA's Teachability
          o ELIZA is Turing Complete
          o SpotTheBot
          o A Code-Based ELIZA Phylogeny
      + The Original ELIZA
      + Commonly Known ELIZA Clones
      + Try an ELIZA
      + Other ELIZA-like Programs
      + News
      + ELIZA-Related Resources

 
The Genealogy of ELIZA

This site is dedicated to tracing the legacy ofJoseph Weizenbaum's
ELIZA (aka. Doctor) program. The site is curated by Jeff Shrager (
jshrager@stanford.edu). See the bottom of this page for additional
members of "Team ELIZA".  We thank CommerceNet for their support.

Click here to go to the page describing the original ELIZA

Adam Gordon Bell, who creates the CoRecursive Podcast, interviewed
Jeff Shrager, curator of ElizaGen.org, about the discovery of the
ELIZA code in July 2022. [Link]

 
Latest News (click here to read the blog, and here for previous news)

 
20240214: Ken Pitman (KMP)'s Lisp ELIZA from MIT-AI's ITS history
project

We've added Kent Pitman's (aka. KMP, https://github.com/netsettler)
MACLisp ELIZA to the elizagen repo. This was discovered by Lars
Brinkhoff, and can also be found on his PDP-10 ITS historical sources
repo.


KMP has been a fixture of the Lisp community for decades. Among many
other lisp-related activities, he worked on Macsyma, Maclisp, Emacs,
and authored the Common Lisp HyperSpec. He also chaired several of
the Common Lisp standards subcommittees. He has written several
interesting essays on the history of lisp and lisp-adjacent artifacts
and activities, available here: https://nhplace.com/kent/Papers/.


In the late 1970s, when he started at MIT, KMP took Joseph
Weizenbaum's Intro to Programming (6.030), where he was introduced to
ELIZA. Probably having seen Bernie Cosell's BBN-Lisp ELIZA, KMP wrote
a version of his own on ITS, a locally-developed OS on PDP-10s, that
were the main computers in the MIT-AI lab. ITS had a slightly
different version of Lisp (MACLisp vs. BBNLisp), so Cosell's code
couldn't be run directly, also KMP wanted to hack the program a bit.
He writes: 


"While [this code has] definitely got my work in it, it's pretty
clearly built on someone else's work. Back then there was not a sense
of publication so much as just making existing things better. And
everything was a proto variant of free software because there was no
place one realistically expected one would sell anything. It was just
hack upon hack in that environment. Both intellectual property law
itself, and my naive understanding of it, was quite different then."


KMP provided some additional thoughts on his ELIZA:


"The thing about the DOCTOR program, while it was quite elaborate,
was that it sort of missed the point of what Weizenbaum was trying to
say. It's not that I didn't understand him, but it took me a long
time to really come to viscerally understand the seriousness of his
point. He said that (paraphrasing, maybe badly, from memory) long
before we got to real AI, we would get to things that seemed smart
but weren't, and we would overly trust systems that were not really
smart. He was, for example, very worried about computerized launch of
nuclear missiles using what was then thought to be AI. But the point
of the original ELIZA was not to BE elaborate, it was to be simple,
and to show how even a tiny, tiny program could seem smart. It was
hard not to think it could be smarter if it were not so tiny, but
that misses the point, which was about how easily we were confused,
not about how much more effectively we could be confused if more
energy were put in. So whether my DOCTOR or any other was making the
right point was hard to say. My guess is not."

 
Some Images

 
TEAM ELIZA 

David M. Berry (https://profiles.sussex.ac.uk/p125219-david-berry) is
Professor of Digital Humanities, University of Sussex, UK. David
writes widely on philosophy and technology, particularly in terms of
computation, software and algorithms. His most recent book is Digital
Humanities: Knowledge and Critique in a Digital Age. His more recent
work has looked at explainability, human understanding and the
history of the university. 


Anthony C. Hay was a programmer at Digital Research and Novell. He
has a BSc in Computer Science from Imperial College, London. His
first programs were toggled into a homemade 6800 computer in 1977.
Anthony has written a near-perfect clone of the original MAD-SLIP
ELIZA in C++, which can be found here: https://github.com/anthay/
ELIZA. This was based initially on Weizenbaum's 1966 ELIZA paper in
CACM, and then corrected after the MAD-SLIP source code for ELIZA was
discovered in Weizenbaum's MIT archive.


Mark C. Marino (http://markcmarino.com) is a writer and scholar of
electronic literature living in Los Angeles.  He also teaches writing
at the University of Southern California where he Directs the
Humanities and Critical Code Studies Lab (http://haccslab.com),
exploring the cultural meaning of computer source code.  He recently
published Critical Code Studies with MIT Press and is one of the 10
authors of 10 PRINT.  Mark is the Director of Communication of the
Electronic Literature Organization (http://eliterature.org).


Peter Millican originally studied Mathematics at Oxford, but changed
subject owing to fascination with Philosophy. After postgraduate
studies, he started taking a serious interest in computers, which led
to a permanent lectureship in Computing and Philosophy at Leeds
University in 1985. Much of his work there was devoted to
interdisciplinary links, and in 2000 he created his Elizabeth chatbot
program (a more powerful ELIZA) to attract humanities students. In
2005 he was appointed at Hertford College in Oxford, becoming
Professor of Philosophy in 2010, and in 2012 he started the Oxford
joint degree in Computer Science & Philosophy. Elizabeth now plays a
large role in Oxford's outreach activities, and can be found at
https://www.philocomp.net/ai/elizabeth.htm


Jeff Shrager (http://shrager.org) is the current editor/curator of
ELIZAgen.org. He is a dad and an aging Lisp hacker; Indeed, he and
Lisp are about the same age! Jeff has been fascinated by AI since
childhood when he wrote a bad ELIZA knock-off in BASIC which, through
its synchronicity with the personal computer revolution, became the
root of a huge branch of bad ELIZA knock-offs. In 2021 Jeff
re-discovered Wiezenbaum's orginal MAD-SLIP ELIZA in the Weizenbaum
archives at MIT. Jeff has co-authored over 100 AI-related
publications in fields ranging from mathematics to medicine, and
co-founded three biomedical AI startups. At the moment he's an
Adjunct Professor in the Symbolic Systems Program at Stanford, where
he teaches, among other things, Human-AI Interaction Analysis, and
Chief Scientist of Blue Dot Change, where he runs a lab working on
removing methane, the strongest greenhouse gas, from the atmosphere. 


Arthur I Schwarz has a BS in Physics and an MS in Computer Science.
He is a software developer and technical lead working in the
aerospace and automotive industries with experience in software
architecting, modeling, and algorithm development and design. He has
developed a version of SLIP called gSlip in the public domain. His
active interests are in hashing algorithms, Eliza, and development of
analysis software for anomaly detection. Past algorithm work has been
presented in webinars for the Association of Old Crows, a worldwide
SIGINT community, on binary searching of overlapping intervals on the
real line.


Peggy Weil (pweilstudio.com) is an multidisciplinary artist whose
work addresses our changing physical, digital and sociopolitical
landscapes. Her work spans interactive digital and immersive
technologies, serious games, virtual environments, film and
performance, including, the first net-art chatbot, MrMind.  She did
her graduate work at the Architecture Machine Group/MIT Media Lab in
the early 80's, which provided an early introduction to the
technologies and issues of human/machine interaction, digital media,
AI, telepresence and immersive and virtual environments. She has
taught at UCLA Design Media Arts, California College of the Arts, and
is currently Adjunct Assistant Professor at USC School of Cinematic
Arts.


(TEAM ELIZA has other members who prefer to remain anonymous, and we
heartily thank those who have contributed to this site, and to our
other ELIZA-related research.)

Google Sites
Report abuse
Page details
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse