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/