Recently, an eye-catching research result came out: a scientific research team composed of American and British research teams successfully resurrected the code of ELIZA, the first electronic chat robot in history. A printout of the code for this program, originally written by the late MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum in the 1960s, was accidentally discovered in 2021. The research team overcame many technical difficulties and finally made ELIZA run again decades later, revealing a little-known chapter in the history of artificial intelligence development. This article details this exciting discovery and research process.
A team of researchers from the United States and the United Kingdom recently successfully resurrected a chatbot code called ELIZA, which is considered to be the first electronic chatbot in history. According to their paper posted on the arXiv preprint server, the code was originally written by the late MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum in the 1960s.
In 2021, Miles Crowley, an MIT archivist, discovered a printout of the codes in a box containing Weizenbaum's personal belongings. After subsequent review, these codes were confirmed to be ELIZA's original codes. At that time, the term "chatbot" had not yet been coined, and Weizenbaum likely viewed the program as a kind of electronic therapist. ELIZA is designed as a request/response tool where users can ask it questions and the system responds with simple responses and follow-up questions, an interaction similar to a conversation with a human therapist.
Although the code for the original ELIZA was historically thought to be lost, some versions of ELIZA written by other programmers still exist. The program was written in Lisp and originally ran on the ARPAnet, then gradually spread to home computers and became a "friend" of technology enthusiasts.
After discovering the code, the research team set out to make it work. First, they needed to develop an operating environment, since ELIZA was written for an obsolete operating system. The research team also found that the code needed to be cleaned up and in some cases they had to write functions that were not shown in the code.
Finally, the research team successfully ran the program last December. They ran it as a request/response tool as originally designed and found that it performed beyond their expectations. Although it is not comparable to modern large-scale language models, they think this resurrection process is interesting.
However, they also found an obvious bug, that is, if the user enters numbers, the program will crash, but for the sake of maintaining originality, the research team chose to retain this bug. They believe that ELIZA is an important milestone in the history of computing because it represents the first known electronic chatbot.
Highlight:
ELIZA is the first electronic chatbot, coded by Joseph Weizenbaum in the 1960s.
The research team successfully resurrected the code and made it functional, although some technical issues needed to be resolved.
ELIZA is important in the history of computing and is considered the pioneer of chatbots.
The resurrection of ELIZA is not only a technical success, but also a valuable review of the history of artificial intelligence development. It reminds us that even the earliest attempts laid the foundation for today's advanced technology. The significance of this research goes far beyond that. It provides us with a new perspective on understanding the evolution of artificial intelligence, and also inspires us to continue to explore the infinite possibilities of artificial intelligence.