[HN Gopher] Joseph Weizenbaum's Original Eliza
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       Joseph Weizenbaum's Original Eliza
        
       Author : tobr
       Score  : 59 points
       Date   : 2022-07-09 07:11 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (sites.google.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (sites.google.com)
        
       | MarkSweep wrote:
       | 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/
        
         | adamgordonbell wrote:
         | Podcast host here. Thanks for sharing!
         | 
         | The whole episode is sort of the back story of ELIZA and
         | ELIZAGen effort.
        
           | abrax3141 wrote:
           | There's a fun list of minor errata to the podcast there as
           | well.
        
       | pmoriarty wrote:
       | 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...
        
       | spullara wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | Animats wrote:
       | Now if they could only find the seduction script written for the
       | same engine. That seems to have been lost.
        
       | stolenmerch wrote:
       | 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...
        
         | adamgordonbell wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | abrax3141 wrote:
           | 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."
        
       | JKCalhoun wrote:
       | 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.)
        
         | abrax3141 wrote:
         | The Parry-Eliza conversation, mentioned in the podcast, is
         | actually an RFC: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc439
        
       | codeulike wrote:
       | 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
        
         | dukoid wrote:
         | 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...
        
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       (page generated 2022-07-10 23:00 UTC)