ELIZA

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For other uses, see Eliza.
Example of ELIZA in Emacs.
Example of ELIZA in Emacs.

ELIZA is a computer program by Joseph Weizenbaum, designed in 1966, which parodied a Rogerian therapist, largely by rephrasing many of the patient's statements as questions and posing them to the patient. Thus, for example, the response to "My head hurts" might be "Why do you say your head hurts?" The response to "My mother hates me" might be "Who else in your family hates you?" ELIZA was named after Eliza Doolittle, a working-class character in George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion, who is taught to speak with an upper class accent.

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[edit] Overview

It is sometimes inaccurately said that ELIZA "simulates" (or worse, "emulates") a therapist[citation needed]. Weizenbaum said that ELIZA provided a "parody" of "the responses of a non-directional psychotherapist in an initial psychiatric interview." He chose the context of psychotherapy to "sidestep the problem of giving the program a data base of real-world knowledge", the therapeutic situation being one of the few real human situations in which a human being can reply to a statement with a question that indicates very little specific knowledge of the topic under discussion. For example, it is a context in which the question "Who is your favorite composer?" can be answered acceptably with responses such as "What about your own favorite composer?" or "Does that question interest you?"

First implemented in Weizenbaum's own SLIP list-processing language, ELIZA worked by simple parsing and substitution of key words into canned phrases. Depending upon the initial entries by the user the illusion of a human writer could be instantly dispelled, or could continue through several interchanges. It was sometimes so convincing that there are many anecdotes about people becoming very emotionally caught up in dealing with ELIZA for several minutes until the machine's true lack of understanding became apparent[citation needed]. This was likely due to people's tendency to attach meanings to words which the computer never put there.

In 1966, interactive computing (via a teletype) was new. It was 15 years before the personal computer became familiar to the general public, and two decades before most people encountered attempts at natural language processing in Internet services like Ask.com or PC help systems such as Microsoft Office Clippy. Although those programs included years of research and work (while Ecala eclipsed the functionality of ELIZA after less than two weeks of work by a single programmer)[citation needed], ELIZA remains a milestone simply because it was the first time a programmer had attempted such a human-machine interaction with the goal of creating the illusion (however brief) of human-human interaction.

In the article "theNewMediaReader" an excerpt from "From Computer Power and Human Reason" by Joseph Weizenbaum in 1976, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort he references how quickly and deeply people became emotionally involved with the computer program, taking offence when he asked to view the transcripts, saying it was an invasion of their privacy, even asking him to leave the room while they were working with ELIZA.

[edit] Influence on games

ELIZA impacted a number of early computer games by demonstrating additional kinds of interface designs. Don Daglow wrote an enhanced version of the program called Ecala on a PDP-10 mainframe computer at Pomona College in 1973 before writing the first computer role-playing game, Dungeon (1975). It is likely that ELIZA was also on the system where Will Crowther created Adventure, the 1975 game that spawned the interactive fiction genre. But both these games appeared some nine years after the original ELIZA.

[edit] Response and legacy

Lay responses to ELIZA were disturbing to Weizenbaum and motivated him to write his book Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, in which he explains the limits of computers, as he wants to make clear in people's minds his opinion that the anthropomorphic views of computers are just a reduction of the human being and any life form for that matter.

There are many programs based on ELIZA in different languages in addition to Ecala. For example, in 1980, a company called "Don't Ask Software", founded by Randy Simon, created a version for the Apple II, Atari, and Commodore PCs, which verbally abused the user based on the user's input. In Spain, Jordi Perez developed the famous ZEBAL in 1993, written in Clipper for MS-DOS. Other versions adapted ELIZA around a religious theme, such as ones featuring Jesus (both serious and comedic) and another Apple II variant called I Am Buddha. The 1980 game The Prisoner incorporated ELIZA-style interaction within its gameplay.

ELIZA has also inspired a podcast called "The Eliza Podcast", in which the host engages in self-analysis using a computer generated voice prompting with questions in the same style as the ELIZA program.[1]

[edit] Implementations

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[edit] See also

[edit] References

This article was originally based on material from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, which is licensed under the GFDL.

  1. ^ The Eliza Podcast » About the Podcast

[edit] External links