So why was Eliza created? ELIZA's creator, Weizenbaum, intended the program as a method to explore communication between humans and machines. He was surprised, and shocked, that individuals attributed human-like feelings to the computer program, including Weizenbaum's secretary.[3] Many academics believed that the program would be able to positively influence the lives of many people, particularly those with psychological issues, and that it could aid doctors working on such patients' treatment.[3][12] While ELIZA was capable of engaging in discourse, it could not converse with true understanding.[13] discovered in the MIT archives and published on various platforms, such as archive.org.[14]


← ◯ →

WHAT DOES ELIZA DO? Using "'pattern matching" and substitution methodology, the program gives canned responses that made early users feel they were talking to someone who understood their input. discovered in the MIT archives and published on various platforms, such as archive.org.[14] The source-code is of high historical interest as it demonstrates not only the specificity of programming languages and techniques at that time, but also the

Eliza the first NLP computer program. Learn everything about it. Exclusively, in an interview with her creator, Joseph Weizenbaum.

    Hello, I'm Eliza

    since 1966
    This was made to respond like a Rogerian psychotherapist. In this instance, the therapist "reflects" on questions by turning the questions back at the patient. ELIZA was one of the first chatterbots (later clipped to chatbot). It was also an early test case for the Turing Test, a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. By today's standards ELIZA fails very quickly if you ask it a few complex questions.
    ← ◯ →
    I first encountered ELIZA on the Tandy/Radio Shack computers that made up the first computer lab in the junior high school where I taught in the 1970s. By then, ELIZA was a software tween herself. This early natural language processing program had been written in the mid-1960s at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory by Joseph Weizenbaum. It supposedly had been created to demonstrate how superficial human to computer communications was at that time. But, when it was put on personal computers, humans found it quite engaging.

      Nice talking to you