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Illustration of Eliza

Eliza

Overview

Eliza was the first chatterbot to make a splash in popular culture, originally written and conceived by Dr. Joseph Weizenbaum of MIT in 1966 to mockingly ape the style of a person-centered (Rogerian) psychotherapist or counselor, largely by prompting the user to elaborate on topics sampled from previous user input. A typical session would take the form of a typed dialogue (sometimes with simulated typing errors to further the suspension of disbelief), with the computer asking the user a series of questions and being fed responses from which to generate further questions. The game stimulated early consideration of computer artificial intelligence (or the appearance thereof), not infrequently passing the Turing test and fooling users into believing (for a little while, at least) that they were interacting with a real human being on the other end... blazing a trail subsequently followed down by Perry the Paranoid and Racter. Additionally, the nods its conversational interface made toward natural language processing (or, again, the appearance thereof) are considered to have been influential on the early mainframe development of the interface for text adventure games such as Adventure and Zork. Considered as a game, it is nearly the polar opposite to Emily Short's Galatea -- instead of the player probing the computer with questions, the computer probes the player with them. Many different stories will still be revealed, but in this case, that's because it'll be people tricked by the program into telling them.

Developers
Steve Grumette
Platform
Commodore 64
Alternate Names
No information available
Wikipedia
No information available
Video
No information available

Media

Box - Back

Eliza - Box - Back (North America) - 800x786
North America -  800 x 786

Box - Front

Eliza - Box - Front (North America) - 800x781
North America -  800 x 781

Clear Logo

Eliza - Clear Logo (null) - 350x165
350 x 165

Disc

Eliza - Disc (North America) - 908x902
North America -  908 x 902

Fanart - Box - Front

Eliza - Fanart - Box - Front (null) - 720x968
720 x 968

Screenshot - Gameplay

Eliza - Screenshot - Gameplay (null) - 320x200
320 x 200
Eliza - Screenshot - Gameplay (null) - 640x400
640 x 400