The original code for the first AI chatbot, ELIZA, was recovered after 60 years!

[thewayne]

The code was written by Joseph Weizenbaum, a German Jew whose family fled Nazi Germany for the USA and studied at Wayne State in Detroit. He wrote ELIZA in a programming language that he created called MAD-SLIP, Michigan Algorithm Decoder Symmetric List Processor, in only 420 lines of code! It was quickly translated into Lisp, a language well-regarded for AI work. His work developing MAD-SLIP earned him an associate professor slot at MIT where he ultimately wrote ELIZA, that post became a tenured professorship in four years. He also held academic appointments at Harvard, Stanford, the University of Bremen, and elsewhere. He passed away in 2008 and is buried in Germany.

From the article, "Experts thought the original 420-line ELIZA code was lost until 2021, when study co-author Jeff Shrager, a cognitive scientist at Stanford University, and Myles Crowley, an MIT archivist, found it among Weizenbaum's papers.

"I have a particular interest in how early AI pioneers thought," Shrager told Live Science in an email. "Having computer scientists' code is as close to having a record of their thoughts, and as ELIZA was — and remains, for better or for worse — a touchstone of early AI, I want to know what was in his mind." But why the team wanted to get ELIZA working is more complex, he said.

They go on to talk about building an emulator to simulate the computers from the 1960s to run the code properly, and discovering and deciding to keep in place a bug in the code.

Pretty cool stuff. And only 420 lines of code!

https://www.livescience.com/technology/eliza-the-worlds-1st-chatbot-was-just-resurrected-from-60-year-old-computer-code

https://slashdot.org/story/25/01/18/0544212/worlds-first-ai-chatbot-eliza-resurrected-after-60-years


Weisenbaum was an interesting person with some cool philosophies regarding computers and AI, of which he had some apprehensions. Two movies were made about him, he also published several books. His wikipedia page is worth a read, IMO.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Weizenbaum

Comments

[disneydream06]

So we can blame Joe for the mess we are in? LOL..........
Hugs, Jon

[thewayne]

Nope.  He had some decided opinions about the use of AI and probably would have been shocked at what it's being used for today. He wasn't remotely the inventor of it, it's been studied since the '50s.

[disneydream06]

Sorry Joe. :o

[acelightning73]

When I first got a Commodore 64, I managed to learn BASIC from the manual that came with the gizmo. THere was a program called ELIZA, which was intended to simulate a "client-centered therapy" psychologist. It stored the patient's responses, and inserted them into its questions. (You said your mother was always asking you to change your hairstyle. DOes this have anything to do with why you hate having your hair styled?") I wrote something in BASIC that emulated this behavior with simple string-handling commands. And I called it "Liz", a shorter/simpler version of ELIZA. Alas, BASIC is the only programming language I ever learned (well, I had to use FORTRAN in college in 1966) And that old C-64 was scrapped as electronic waste back in the previous millennium, so I don't think I'd be able to contribute anything.

[thewayne]

As long as you had fun doing it.  Sounds like a cool little adaptation that you did!

[acelightning73]

I had a lot of fun with BASIC. I made cute little animations, and instead of the usual ways to create the timing of each animated bit, I used the sound functions, and made the beeps and bouncing noises to create the right intervals for each motion. And the string handling built into BASIC led to a lot of interesting phenomena. I was in an IRC channel with a bunch of Goths in Australia, and I amassed a collection of jokes, quotes, and other things to use as tag lines. I created an automatic tagline picker, and it seemed to have developed a mind of its own. It would often give me a tagline that was eerily relevant to the message I had just typed. It was supposed to have been random, but it seemed to think the way I did. That silly little C64, and the fact that my husband was working as a programmer, gave me the urge to learn more about the Internet and such things. I eventually taught myself HTML from a book, so I could design my own website, and filled it with poetry, erotica, and clipart decorations. My ISP made me take it down when they discovered the "adult" content. And being the curious geek that I am, I just keep messing around with what I find to see what I can do with it.

[thewayne]

I really wish my parents had bought me an Apple or a Commodore.  I bought myself my first computer, a TRS-80 Model 100.  LCD display, 40 columns by 8 lines.  And I did a lot of programming with it, but it wasn't designed for fun programming, more for business-oriented.  I programmed a lot of role-playing game character generators, dice randomizers, stuff like that.

[acelightning73]

Eventually my husband brought home an IBM 360(?) from work, and I got to playing around with that. And eventually we upgraded to "serious" personal computers.

[thewayne]

Nice!  I never got in to doing graphic stuff, always wish I had.  One of these days I may install a Logo package and play around with that.

[acelightning73]

I had a completely illegal copy of Photoshop at first, and more recently I moved on to GIMP, which is a Linux-based graphics program. I used it for a long time, and it decided to update itself, and the new version does't have the same tools in the same places, and I found it awkward, because I was so habituated to the old version.

[thewayne]

Well, I do photo editing, been a photographer for over four decades.  Been in a nation magazine, been used in internal advertising, won some local awards.  I'm talking programming graphcs stuff.

[silveradept]

Good work, both in finding the code and in being able to build a proper emulation device for the original code.

[thewayne]

I think it was pretty cool.