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

[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.