Re: Looking for an old A2 program

[Val Golding <notval@blarg.net>]

"Eliza" came long before the Mac was a gleam in Woz's eye. I had a
copy of Eliza in early 1978.


On 19 May 2002 08:23:40 GMT, mjmahon@aol.com (Michael J. Mahon) wrote:

>Terry & Utahna Olsen wrote:
>
>>Remember that old "Artificial intelligence" program that you could "chat"
>>with?  It was supposed to be a bratty little girl.  I think it was written
>>in Integer or Applesoft.  Anyway, what was it's name and can it be
>>downloaded anywhere?
>
>If you mean "Eliza", it wasn't a bratty little girl, it was a Rogerian
>therapist in style.  Basically, it reflecting what you said back to
>you in a surprisingly natural way by performing simple linguistic
>analysis of the input and transforming it to produce the output.
>(Except occasionally, when the program detected that things
>were getting stuck--when it would ask about something off the wall.)
>
>It began life as an academic exercise, written by Joseph Wiezenbaum
>at MIT on the MAC time-sharing system as a kind of demo.  It was
>named after Eliza Doolittle, who was taught "how to speak" in Shaw's
>Pygmalion (the source of My Fair Lady).
>
>There's a nice article on it by Weizenbaum at:
>
>http://i5.nyu.edu/~mm64/x52.9265/january1966.html
>
>Many other implementations followed the lead of the original,
>and some were written in BASIC.
>
>-michael
>
> Email:  mjmahon@aol.com
> Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/