December 21, 2024, just before 2:00 p.m. Scientists make dead people talk: ELIZA, the world's first chatbot. returned– Long imitated but not perfectly replicated ELIZA was thought to have been lost for a long time. But scientists discovered an early version of the code. in the code creator's archives in 2021, and it took years of intervention to piece it back together.
ELIZA has been resurrected and so can you. Download here to see for yourself
ELIZA was coded and duplicated from 1964 to 1967 by MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum. By today's basic standards, ELIZA was popular at the time it was created. He gave it the personality of a psychotherapist. And his secretary was so fascinated by it, she asked Weizenbaum to leave the room when she talked to him.
g new science article From members of the ELIZA archeology project, details how they discovered and revived the chatbot. Including its origins and subsequent distribution, Weizenbaum programmed ELIZA in an early language called MAD-SLIP on a time-sharing computer system called the Compatible Time-Sharing System, or CTSS.
Eliza quickly fled from Weisenbaum. Because it was spread through computer networks in the early days. Programmers have therefore adapted it to other languages. One of the first clones These were created in Lisp by one of the technical leaders of ARPAnet, the forerunner of the modern internet. The Lisp version of Eliza was one of the first bits of information on the nascent and rapidly spreading network.
“As a result, Cosell's Lisp ELIZA quickly became the dominant species, and Weizenbaum's MAD-SLIP version, which was not visible on ARPAnet, was consigned to history,” the report said. The original 2021 MAD-SLIP ELIZA hasn't been seen in at least 50 years.”
A decade later, a magazine called Creative Computing published a clone of ELIZA written in BASIC. It was 1977, the same year the Apple II, Commodore Pet, and TRS-80 all hit the market. Those machines led to the explosion in home computers and the spread of basic computer languages.
“And there might be a few hobbyists interested enough in the AI possibilities to type into this BASIC ELIZA (which is just a few pages of code) and experiment with it themselves,” the scientists said. “Due to its brevity and simplicity, And with the ubiquity of personal computers, this ELIZA has spawned hundreds of knockoffs over the decades. In every programming language imaginable. Making this possibly the biggest knockout program in history/ Just as Cosell's Lisp ELIZA spread through ARPANet, BASIC ELIZA spread through the spread of personal computers.”
Countless BASIC versions of ELIZA are now available online, and the original MAD-SLIP version was thought to be lost to history long ago. Then Jeff Slager, a computer scientist at Stanford University, convinced the archives. The MIT documents rooted through Weizenbaum's contents, and they made an important discovery: an early version of the MAD-SLIP code.
Incomplete code And it took very complex fixes and simulations to get the code working again. “A lot of steps are required to clean up the code and make it complete. Installing and editing the simulator stack Debugging code that is found to be unnecessary. and even writing some new functionality not found in the archive or in existing MAD and SLIP implementations,” the paper said.
It takes a lot of time and effort. But code archaeologists have put ELIZA back to work. And they're open to everyone. “This has been tested on various versions of Linux and MacOS. But we noticed some issues in different versions. Therefore, your mileage may vary,” they said in the report. “If you make it work on your machine and find that you need to change something, Please let me know.”