The first chatbot revival in the world from 60 years code

Joseph Weizenbaum, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), developed Chatbot Eliza in the 1960s. Its name was placed according to Eliza Doolittle, the main character in the play “Pygmalion”, who was taught how to talk like a one -like talk. British noble women.

As a language model that can interact with users, Eliza has a great impact on artificial intelligence today. This chatbot is programmed to respond to questions as a psychotherapist. For example, Eliza will say “let me know your problem”. If the user enters “men are the same”, the program will respond “in what way?”.

Weizenbaum wrote Eliza in a programming language that he invented, called the Michigan (Mad-Slip) algorithm that was immediately copied into the LISP language. With the introduction of the Internet, the LISP version spreads widely and the original becomes outdated.

Experts say that the original Eliza code of 420 lines has been lost until 2021, when Jeff Shrager, a cognitive scientist at Stanford University, and Myles Crowley, a stored specialist at MIT, found it in documents. of Weizenbaum. In a new study published on the database arXivShrager and colleagues shared about the revival of Eliza from this computer code, Live Science January 18 reported.

The revival process is not simple, requiring the research team to clean, fix code errors and create a simulation process to simulate the type of computer that can run Eliza in the 1960s. Run Eliza – For the first time after 60 years – on December 21, 2024.

The team also discovered an error in the code and the option was not corrected. “It will ruin the authenticity of artifacts, like fixing a wrong drawing in the original Mona Lisa,” Shrager explained. The program will be faulty if the user enters some, for example “today you are 999 years old”.

Although not comparable to the ability of modern language models (LLM) such as chatgpt, Eliza is really noticeable if it considers it was born in 1965, according to co -author David Berry, Professor Humanities at Sussex University, England. “It can maintain a conversation for a while,” Berry said.

One thing Eliza do better than modern chatbot is listening, according to Shrager. Modern LLMs only try to complete the user’s sentences, while Eliza is programmed to encourage users to continue the conversation. “It is more like ‘chat’ than any chatbot since then,” Shrager said.

“The revival of Eliza, one of the most famous chatbot in history, helps people understand the lost history,” Berry said. Because the field of computer science is often geared towards the future, practices tend to consider the history of this field as obsolete and not conservation. However, Berry believes that computer history is also a cultural history.