About
ELIZA is one of the most influential computer programs ever written. Developed by Joseph Weizenbaum, at MIT in the mid 1960s, long before ChatGPT, ELIZA was the world's first chatbot; the first program to enable people to hold a conversation with a computer. How ELIZA communicated was controlled by a script. The most famous script, indeed the only one ever published, was called DOCTOR. That script caused ELIZA to behave like a Rogerian psychotherapist, offering little of its own input, instead asking leading questions that encouraged its human interlocutor to carry the conversation forward.
This relatively simple program has had a remarkable impact on computer science, and more widely in culture, and continues to inspire and shape our vision of computers, whether in works of fiction, like HAL9000 from 2001, or in our daily interactions with SIRI and ALEXA.
ELIZA is remarkably only 420 line of code, written in a language called MAD-SLIP. That is, 57 years after the initial publication (CACM 1966) of ELIZA, we are still talking about a program which is minuscule in size and yet has had such a large impact.
Yet even given its importance, the original source-code for ELIZA was never published, and remained lost for half a century. Recently, however, our team of researchers from Europe and the United States rediscovered the original ELIZA code in Dr. Weizenbaum's archives at MIT. Through this artifact, and others that were found alongside it, we are uncovering the fascinating history of the great-grandmother of all chatbots.
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