Re: Looking for an old A2 program

[mjmahon@aol.com (Michael J. Mahon)]

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/