11 ms·

AI or Ain't: Eliza

123 points by john-doe 3y ago

jll29 3y ago
Here is the pointer to the original Eliza paper https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/365153.365168 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/365153.365168 Note that Weizenbaum was an AI critic: Weizenbaum's intention was not for Eliza to pass the Turing test, but to show to people that a clearly not intelligent program based on primitive pattern matching can appear to behave intelligently. He failed: His own secretary wanted to be left alone with the software and typed in her personal problems. Work on Eliza (1963-65, paper published 1966) until today is mostly misunderstood.
- leethargo 3y ago
  Not only his secretary, also some psychiatrists wanted Eliza as a tool to scale up their work clinically.
  - moffkalast 3y ago
    Say, has anyone deployed Hartford's Samantha yet?
- adestefan 3y ago
  Weizenbaum even wrote an entire book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment To Calculation, on how AI is a crank term for computer science. The basic premise is that humans are not machine so stop using language that treats them as such. Especially that computers can decide what comes next, but only a human can choose what to do. The book also has one of the best and most succinct descriptions of Turing machines and the theoretical underpinning of computer science that I have ever read. Even if you’re an AI maximalist you should read the third chapter of the book.
  - stavros 3y ago
    > Especially that computers can decide what comes next, but only a human can choose what to do. I don't understand this, all the programs I've ever written make decisions based on some factors. Are you talking about free will? If so, what is free will?
    - aatd86 3y ago
      Doing things because you can and not because you have to? Creative endeavors in the largest sense?
      - stavros 3y ago
        Does a program have to do things? What can it do? What does a human have to/can do?
        aatd86 3y ago
        Traditionally, a program is a series of instructions. The program doesn't really act on its own. Now, a program which is objective driven and can infer from new inputs might be something else. Just like humans try to maximize the stability of their structures via a reward system. (it got slighty complex, faulty at times, or the tradeoff between work vs reward is not always in favor of work because we do not control every variable, hence procrastination for example, or addiction which is not a conscious process but neuro-chemically induced).
        stavros 3y ago
        But what does "act on its own" mean? If I give the program some randomness over its next action, is that "acting on its own"? When I'm at work, I act according to a series of instructions. Am I not acting on my own? This is a very philosophical discussion, but if I had an infinitely-powerful computer and could simulate an entire universe based on a series of instructions (physical laws), would the beings in that universe that created societies not be "acting on their own"?
  - erikerikson 3y ago
    > humans are not machine Aren't we? Casual chains upon our matter produce emergent behaviors using the same physics and chemistry that our mechanistic creations rely upon. Certainly those behaviors and results do not produce the same repeatable, predictable results as our clockworks but that is the whole point of the field of AI (as opposed to the marketing corruption/term that is currently in vogue, so GAI if you prefer), to produce system and algorithm structures designed with architecture and patterns more like our own. Perhaps you believe in the ghost in the machine hypothesis? The magical soul that is more than the emergent evolving pattern produced across time by DNA replicators? That this undefinable, unmeasurable spirit makes us forever different?
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - aftoprokrustes 3y ago
      This is an hypothesis. Of course, it is obvious that a lot of what human/animals are and do can be explained or described by physical processes. But there is the "hard problem of consciousness", to which no one has a satisfying answer. I feel sarcasm in your last paragraph, but it feels rather dishonest, in the sense that you voluntarily use rather crude and ridiculous formulations, as if it was the only alternative. But there is some arrogance in thinking that we, smart as we are, finally got the final answer about one of the hardest questions in philosophy and metaphysics. Materialism is not proven: it is a basic methodological assumption of modern science - meaning that we do not have the tools to either prove or disprove it. Newton, Gödel and lots of other renowed scientists are knowed to have opposed materialism. Let's accept that the question is open. On this topic, I always recommend reading the report of the Galileo Commission, which is a manifesto by a wide range of scientists and philosophers to reduce the stigma associated with even questioning this fundamental dogma.
      - erikerikson 3y ago
        You've written your response thoughtfully, thank you. Of course my description is of a hypothesis rather than ground truth. It turns out that there isn't consensus over whether "The Hard Problem Of Consciousness" is actually a problem[0] but I need to admit I didn't know that before reading your comment. You may have been too kind in your assumption of my competence level on the subject. As adjunct, my writing was about my own currently highest probability expectations rather than a mature reporting of the state of the field of experts. It did not seem worth (then or now) writing to such a standard on a public discussion forum, even this one. My last paragraph wasn't written with sarcasm (sorry to have given easy opportunity to read that in it) but it was a bit rushed, clumsily written, and unimaginative. Poorly written as it was, my curiosity was sincere (its been some time since I engaged with the state of the art) as was some of my dismissal. I have found it common that people have a belief in the uniqueness of humans as a platform for intelligence that frequently has its roots in sentiment and/or unexamined beliefs. Of course there are individuals whose thoughts meet a much higher bar. It is also the case that faith as a basis of belief does not invalidate the belief. There is so much we don't know. We only recently explained how aspirin works[1]. That didn't stop it from working well during our long period of usage prior to our understanding. I'm comfortable with that an its analog here, that I don't understand consciousness and its mechanisms completely. I seem to experience it and it seems to result from what is, despite my incomplete knowledge of what that "what is" comprises. However, there is an imbalance of evidence for the material hypothesis and it seems plausible that emergent dynamics are sufficient to explain. So... Yes, materialism is not proven and yet I currently hold it as the explanation that makes at least a partial contribution to the more complete truth. Further, that it is the explanation with the greatest volume of evidence and support. I suspect that it is sufficient for the emergence of intelligence and even consciousness in ourselves and as such sufficient for (through the same mechanisms) the emergence of intelligence and consciousness in our artificial constructs. Note that I also suspect we are still some distance from that inflection point. Thank you for the reference to the Galileo Commission. I had not heard of it and am always happy to consider new perspectives and challenge those which I have held. [0] https://survey2020.philpeople.org/ https://survey2020.philpeople.org/ [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14592543/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14592543/
  - 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
    Previous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36901158 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36901158 [PDF]
  - extractionmech 3y ago
    “Me no likee” - Joseph Agassi This post of yours sent me looking for this and I ended up with (now reading) Agassi’s provocative (& brutal) takedown of this book. As to the content of the book, Agassi pointedly mentioned Weiner. I will of course read Weizenbaum after this. (thanks.) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/286058724_Computer_Power_and_Human_Reason_From_Judgment_to_Calculation https://www.researchgate.net/publication/286058724_Computer_... p.s. continuing on, the review turns very positive. Initial vitriol apparently more related to the “two worlds” matter.
- scotty79 3y ago
  > He failed I'd say he succeeded. It just seems that people are perfectly content with just appearance of intelligence.
- tempodox 3y ago
  All this “AI” hype is a constant reminder to me that you cannot reason anybody out of something that they want to believe. People's need to believe in miracles is obviously stronger than all reason.
  - ryanklee 3y ago
    > cannot reason anybody out of something that they want to believe. Especially when your own reasons are not the slam dunk you think they are.
    - __loam 3y ago
      Both sides of this debate are competing to see who can post the most snide comments to the other.
      - ryanklee 3y ago
        There is a ton of arrogance everywhere on this subject. Anyone who doesn't see how complicated and nuanced and difficult figuring out what the hell is going on here really needs to sit down and think a little more carefully. There's absolutely no room for out-of-hand dismissal. We are all babes in the woods right now. We need each other, like always.
- lulznews 3y ago
  Never underestimate human stupidity!
- extreme_orang 3y ago
  Take a look at this project that has rediscovered and recreated the original ELIZA source code. You can even try out an accurate reimplementation of ELIZA http://findingeliza.org/ http://findingeliza.org/
nbzso 3y ago
So the Turing test actually tests not a technology but the level of intelligence of the user. So, we are doomed, it seems.:)
- oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
  Definitely the main flaw of the Turing test — having two human actors taking part alongside one computer is just introducing two too many variables :)
- masswerk 3y ago
  To me, Turing's argument had always been that the attribution of intelligence (or not) doesn't make much sense: rather than being a question of any substance, it merely diffuses into a matter of appearance. However, as things usually are, it had become the holy grail for claiming "intelligence" (which really should be used in this context in quotes only).
- __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
  He originally made the argument about gender, not intelligence. I think he was arguing for a whole class of properties for which there's no difference between authenticity and convincing fakery. I think the point is less that there is a truth and we're too dumb to figure it out, and more that in certain circumstances we'll just have to accept a lower bar for evidence about whether those properties apply. It reminds me of how no class of computer can solve the halting problem for itself. No matter how intelligent you are, there will be holes like this in your certainty about some things.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    Or another way to put this, it's not a binary problem, it's a probability continuum. Even the definition of 'human intelligence' is a continuum from the smartest to the dumbest of us, that doesn't even stop there and descends thought all animal life.
    - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
master-lincoln 3y ago
> Clearly, Eliza is not an AI Sadly the author doesn't elaborate on this. I thought nowadays 'AI' is a synonym for 'algorithm', which would fit ELIZA Is there an accepted definition of the word AI?
- perthmad 3y ago
  Any algorithm you do not understand.
  - mysterydip 3y ago
    So, any of my own code I haven't looked at for a few months? :)
  - throwaway4aday 3y ago
    Including the one in your head.
- maweaver 3y ago
  Seems like the modern definition is something along the lines of an algorithm whose behavior depends on data which was itself machine generated, rather than hand-created by a human like Eliza's rules.
- oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
  We've been misusing the term ever since observing the ghosts in Pac Man.
sixothree 3y ago
I remember this being written in basic for the c64. Not sure if I had the real Eliza or a clone. But it was fun to look at all of the canned responses and try to get it to respond with them.
- smcameron 3y ago
  Probably a variant of the Eliza program in "More BASIC Computer Games", see p. 56 of this PDF: https://ia802707.us.archive.org/33/items/More_BASIC_Computer_Games/More_BASIC_Computer_Games.pdf https://ia802707.us.archive.org/33/items/More_BASIC_Computer...
  - sixothree 3y ago
    That's likely the one.
aldousd666 3y ago
Eliza's meant to us to be an illustration of the problem. In good old fashioned AI sentiment, it illustrates the fact that you need another if statement for every new kind of construct you want to simulate. But you deign to simulate each thing, like say turning a verb into a gerund, by writing a specific "gerundification" routine. Another to swap the Mes to Yous, etc. this isn't how people think nor most modern AI. This is totally different from just looking at the world distilling patterns from it and using those patterns as the basis for a response. To teach a modern AI new stuff, you don't have to write another if statement. They have similar intentions and at some resolution or distance, they are trying to do similar things. However, they work and totally different ways and the new dynamic generative AI strategy that learns from input as opposed to just symbolically transforming it syntactically is a totally different paradigm. I don't care whether you call it AI or not.
- masswerk 3y ago
  With the small reservation that this is not how Eliza works. Eliza sits on top of MAD/SLIP which does all the heavy work and provides lists and integer indexes, which is what is processed by Eliza. This allows Eliza to work on decomposition rules, which isolate keywords per position and context, and transformation (composition) rules to recombine elements and links between those two. Meaning, the model is much more topological than this. (Arguably, this is closer to regular expressions than to if-else trees.) However, this isn't what Eliza is all about. It's rather about the question, how little do you actually need in terms of knowledge, world model, or rule sets to give the impression of an "intelligent" (even sympathetic) participant in a conversation (as long as you're able to constrain the conversation to a setting, which doesn't require any world knowledge, at all.) To a certain degree, it is also about how eager we are to overestimate the capabilities of such a partner in conversation, as soon as some criteria seem to be satisfied. Which is arguably still relevant today. The rule set, BTW, is actually small, just 3 pages in a printout, achieving a surprising generality (or rather, appearance thereof) for its size. Compare: https://cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/572/S02/weizenbaum.eliza.1966.pdf https://cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/572/S02/weizenbaum.eliza.1...
  - pixl97 3y ago
seanwilson 3y ago
> One of the first computer programs that successfully passed the Turing test was Eliza. Created in 1966 by Joseph Weizenbaum, Eliza skillfully emulated the speech patterns of a psychotherapist in its conversations. Why was the Turing test still relevant after this? Didn't this indicate it was very flawed test? Or it was hard to come up with a better test?
- recursivecaveat 3y ago
  I can find no reference of an actual Turing test being done for Eliza. If you look at the link from the article it is clearly demonstrably failing their (different, and more difficult to interpret, but still fair I thiiiink) runs today as well. Note that people constantly willfully misinterpret what a turing test is. A turing test means you enter into two conversations. Then you pick which one was with a computer. If people answer wrong 50% of the time, the computer is indistinguishable, hence it passes. Note that it is not "People get wrong whether their single conversation is talking to an AI >50% of the time" and it is definitely not "sometimes people don't realize they're talking to an AI". In particular people constantly write about the latter because it generates clicks.
- canjobear 3y ago
  Because Eliza didn’t pass the Turing Test. It is trivially easy to trip it up.
- GuB-42 3y ago
  The variant of the Turing test that Eliza has passed is the easiest one. That is: convince a novice interrogator that what is on the other side of the screen is a human. The real turing test (the imitation game) involve a computer and a human subject, both talking to a human interrogator. The interrogator must determine who is the human. It is an adverserial situation, both the human subject and interrogator do everything in their power for the interrogator to correctly identify the computer. The computer has to not only convince the interrogator, but also do it better than the human subject. Furthermore, both humans are supposed to be experts in the game, just like the computer that is designed to pass the test. So, not just random people.
throwaway4aday 3y ago
> Interestingly, Eliza still outperforms ChatGPT in certain Turing test variations. I see we have a new entry for the 2024 Lies of Omission award. The article linked to plainly shows that Eliza only beats ChatpGPT-3.5 and is in the bottom half when ranked against a variety of different system prompts. An excellent ass covering strategy that relies on the reader not checking sources. An honest author would have actually quoted the article saying: > GPT-4 achieved a success rate of 41 percent, second only to actual humans. instead of constructing a deliberately misleading paraphrase.
- masswerk 3y ago
  Hum, note that this was not an argument about or against GPT, but about the "unreasonable" success of a, by all standards, primitive algorithm that manages to get (somewhat) away by crafting the pre- and context of the conversation. By no means, on the other hand, could I read this article and understand it as claiming any superiority over modern applications. (Nobody with even the crudest understanding of the principles of Eliza could claim this, and the article clearly demonstrates a detailed understanding. Disclaimer: I wrote the JS implementation linked in the article, many years ago.) Edit: The question rightfully raised – and answered – by Eliza, which is still relevant today in the context of GPT, is: does the appearance of intelligent conversation (necessarily) hint at the presence of a world model in any rudimentary form?
  - throwaway4aday 3y ago
    Several people in this thread appear to have misunderstood due to the way this article was written.
- notahacker 3y ago
  "GPT-4 achieved a success rate of 41 percent, second only to actual humans" also feels like a (much bigger) lie of omission looking at the original paper. GPT4's performance was in the range of 6% to 41%, Eliza's 27% score sat in the upper middle of that range, and considering the bots tested consisted of 8 GPT4 prompts, 2 GPT3.5 prompts and a naive script from the 1960s, GPT4 would have had to be remarkably consistently inhuman not to finish "second only to humans" with its highest scoring prompt The blog appears to have been updated to specify GPT3.5, but the original version was accurate. The paper itself is interesting as it covers the limitations (it has big methodological issues), how the GPT prompts attempted to overridei default chatGPT tone and reasons why ELIZA performed surprisingly well (some thought it was so uncooperative, it must be human!) https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.20216.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.20216.pdf
dboreham 3y ago
It turns out, 50 years later, that Eliza was on the right track.
acidburnNSA 3y ago
So was Eliza from 1966 more intelligent than Dr SBAITSO from 1990? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Sbaitso https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Sbaitso
- the_af 3y ago
  Wasn't SBAITSO pretty much the same idea as Eliza, only using speech synthesis with a Soundblaster?
  - acidburnNSA 3y ago
    Yes. I'm surprised to hear Eliza passed a turing test. SBAITSO was fun but pretty clearly not a human.
    - NavinF 3y ago
      Eliza never passed a turing test. Nobody tried to test Eliza because they knew what the result would be
      - acidburnNSA 3y ago
        I'm responding to the quote in TFA: > One of the first computer programs that successfully passed the Turing test was Eliza. I haven't studied the history of it.
        the_af 3y ago
        Mentioned in arstechnica to my surprise, but do note the paper wasn't peer reviewed and they mention flaws in the methodology. I cannot believe anyone passingly familiar with ELIZA would be fooled by it.
scotty79 3y ago
Can one see original Eliza sourcode anywhere?
- proamdev123 3y ago
  There is a version of it in Emacs, called up with `M-x doctor`. The source is in `doctor.el`. https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsDoctor https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsDoctor
- RugnirViking 3y ago
  We had it running in terminals when I used to work in the national museum of computing in the UK (on machines where you can just pull the full source up from floppy disk)
- DonHopkins 3y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27332340 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27332340 DonHopkins on May 30, 2021 | prev | next [–] Here's the source code for Kent Pitman's "DOCTOR" in MACLISP, which was of course inspired by ELIZA. (Joseph Weizenbaum taught Kent Pitman LISP!) https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/master/src/games/doc.102 https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/master/src/games/doc.102 And here's what happened with he (manually by typing) hooked it up with Kenneth Colby's "PARRY" (the paranoid patient): https://www.maclisp.info/pitmanual/funnies.html https://www.maclisp.info/pitmanual/funnies.html >Parrying Programs >I didn't write the original ELIZA program, although my Lisp class was taught by Joseph Weizenbaum, who did. I later wrote a very elaborate program of similar kind, which I just called DOCTOR, in order to play with some of the ideas. >At some point, I noticed there was a program at Stanford called PARRY (the paranoid patient), by Kenneth Colby. I understand from Wikipedia's PARRY entry that Weizenbaum's ELIZA and PARRY were connected at one point, although I never saw that. I never linked PARRY with my DOCTOR directly, but I did once do it indirectly through a manual typist. Part of my record of this exchange was garbled, but this is a partial transcript, picking up in the middle. Mostly it just shows PARRY was a better patient than my DOCTOR program was a doctor. >I have done light editing to remove the typos we made (rubbed out characters were echoed back in square brackets). >Also, I couldn't find documentation to confirm this, but my belief has always been that the numeric values after each line are PARRY's level of Shame (SH), Anger (AN), Fear (FR), Disgust (DS), Insecurity (IN), and Joy (J).—KMP [...] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38402813 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38402813 DonHopkins 44 days ago | parent | context | favorite | on: The Revival of Medley/Interlisp That's right, it's just a throw-away quip, but if you want the deep nuanced story and inside history of Common Lisp and comparison with Scheme, Kent Pitman is the one to read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_Pitman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_Pitman Index of Kent Pitman's Papers: https://www.nhplace.com/kent/Papers/ https://www.nhplace.com/kent/Papers/ Scheme or Lisp? Kent M Pitman explains the deep philosophical differences. https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6fa5r/scheme_or_lisp_kent_m_pitman_explains_the_deep/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6fa5r/scheme_o... Kent Pitman on Scheme or Lisp?: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.lisp/c/TEk4O4-zsA8/m/HLonoeiFG4cJ https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.lisp/c/TEk4O4-zsA8/m/H... Common Lisp: The Untold Story: https://www.nhplace.com/kent/Papers/cl-untold-story.html https://www.nhplace.com/kent/Papers/cl-untold-story.html Why Wolfram Mathematica did not use Lisp (2002) (ymeme.com): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9797936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9797936 https://web.archive.org/web/20110122140154/http://www.ymeme.com/why-wolfram-(mathematica)-did-not-use-lisp.html https://web.archive.org/web/20110122140154/http://www.ymeme.... Kent Pitman's essay on why lisp doesn't have copying of lists. https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.lisp/c/MmtQreo3PCM https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.lisp/c/MmtQreo3PCM Parenthetically Speaking with Kent Pitman: The Best Intentions: EQUAL Rights -- And Wrongs -- In Lisp: https://www.nhplace.com/kent/PS/EQUAL.html https://www.nhplace.com/kent/PS/EQUAL.html Kent M. Pitman Answers On Lisp And Much More: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/01/11/03/1726251/kent-m-pitman-answers-on-lisp-and-much-more https://developers.slashdot.org/story/01/11/03/1726251/kent-... Kent M. Pitman's Second Wind: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/01/11/13/0420226/kent-m-pitmans-second-wind https://developers.slashdot.org/story/01/11/13/0420226/kent-... Tutorial on Good Lisp Programming Style: Peter Norvig, Sun Microsystems Labs Inc; Kent Pitman, Harlequin Inc.: https://www.cs.umd.edu/~nau/cmsc421/norvig-lisp-style.pdf https://www.cs.umd.edu/~nau/cmsc421/norvig-lisp-style.pdf Notes from the ANSI standardisation process: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/72414053/notes-from-the-ansi-standardisation-process https://stackoverflow.com/questions/72414053/notes-from-the-... Issue CLOS-CONDITIONS Writeup: https://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lw50/CLHS/Issues/iss049_w.htm https://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lw50/CLHS/Issues/iss... On Pitman's “Special forms in Lisp” (2011) (kazimirmajorinc.com): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29947329 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29947329 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29954993 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29954993 DonHopkins on Jan 16, 2022 | parent | next [–] Kent Pitman also wrote the "Revised Maclisp Manual (Saturday Evening Edition)" aka the "Pitmanual". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_A._Moon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_A._Moon http://www.nhplace.com/kent/publications.html http://www.nhplace.com/kent/publications.html >In 1983, I finished the multi-year task of writing The Revised Maclisp Manual (Saturday Evening Edition), sometimes known as The Pitmanual, and published it as a Technical Report at MIT's Lab for Computer Science. In 2007, I finished dusting that document off and published it to the web as the Sunday Morning Edition. http://www.maclisp.info/pitmanual/ http://www.maclisp.info/pitmanual/ Not to be confused with David Moon who wrote the "MacLISP Reference Manual" aka the "Moonual", and who co-authored the "Lisp Machine Manual" with Richard Stallman and Daniel Weinreb, which had big bold lettering that ran around the spine and back of the cover, so it was known as the "LISP CHINE NUAL" (reading only letters on the front). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15185827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15185827 https://hanshuebner.github.io/lmman/title.xml https://hanshuebner.github.io/lmman/title.xml https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15186998 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15186998 DonHopkins on Sept 6, 2017 | next [–] The cover of the Lisp Machine Manual had the title printed in all caps diagonally wrapped around the spine, so on the front you could only read "LISP CHINE NUAL". So the title was phonetically pronounced: "Lisp Sheen Nual". My friend Nick made a run of custom silkscreened orange LISP CHINE NUAL t-shirts (most places won't print around the side like that). https://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lw50/CLHS/Issues/iss049_w.htm https://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lw50/CLHS/Issues/iss... I was wearing mine in Amsterdam at Dappermarkt on Queen's Day (when everyone's supposed to wear orange, so I didn't stand out), and some random hacker (who turned out to be a university grad student) came up to me at random and said he recognized my t-shirt! http://www.textfiles.com/hacking/hakdic.txt http://www.textfiles.com/hacking/hakdic.txt CHINE NUAL (sheen'yu-:l) noun. The reference manual for the Lisp Machine, a computer designed at MIT especially for running the LISP language. It is called this because the title, LISP MACHINE MANUAL, appears in big block letters -- wrapped around the cover in such a way that you have to open the cover out flat to see the whole thing. If you look at just the front cover, you see only part of the title, and it reads "LISP CHINE NUAL" toomanybeersies on Sept 7, 2017 | parent | next [–] Link to an image of the manual, for the lazy: https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/101/264672507_307376d26c_z.jpg https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/101/264672507_307376d26c_z.jpg [...] ;;; Notes about CLI interrupts and eval-in-other-lisp: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20267415 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20267415 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38061207 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38061207 >Here's Kent Pittman's :TEACH;LISP from ITS, which is a MACLISP program that teaches you how to program in MACLISP. (That's "Man And Computer Lisp" from "Project MAC", not "Macintosh Lisp".)
nsajko 3y ago
The article is missing the interesting bits, so here are the relevant Wikipedia pages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Weizenbaum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Weizenbaum
drakonka 3y ago
Many years ago I spent a lot of time on a website called Personality Forge, where you would create chat bots very similar to this and set them loose. They could then talk to other people or each other and you could review the transcripts. At one point I even entered my chat bot in The Chatterbox Challenge. It was so much fun to work on this thing at the time, but when I rediscovered it years later[0] I was mostly just disappointed in how "fake" all that effort was. Now here I am talking about life, the universe, and everything with ChatGPT. It makes me both inexplicably happy/hopeful and simultaneously weirdly melancholic. [0] https://liza.io/its-not-so-bad.-we-have-snail-babies-after-all/ https://liza.io/its-not-so-bad.-we-have-snail-babies-after-a...
- bee_rider 3y ago
  The great thing about being a teenager or kid is that you don’t know why the grownups don’t think your project is worth doing, so you just do it. Even if it doesn’t change the world (most things don’t, after all) you can still learn something and have fun.
ShamelessC 3y ago
I am irrationally upset about the title.
- jamesdwilson 3y ago
  Right there with you. I try to internally read it and get flustered every time.
whoopdedo 3y ago
Then later on there was Azile[1], the evil twin to Eliza. Instead of being trained with data to make it sound helpful and supportive, it uses hostile and insulting language. [1] https://www.civilizr.com/communication/azile-chatbot-savage-af-ai/ https://www.civilizr.com/communication/azile-chatbot-savage-...
deepfriedrice 3y ago
I'm stoked to be learning about the real Eliza, after being surreptitiously exposed via the Zachtronics game [0]. The game has a fascinating dystopian/scifi take where a company provides AI therapy through human "proxies" that simply vocalize the AI response. [0] https://www.zachtronics.com/eliza/ https://www.zachtronics.com/eliza/
ilaksh 3y ago
In a very rough sense, it actually seems more similar to what LLMs are doing than I would have assumed. That might mainly be because they are both attempting to generate more text from an input.

123 points by john-doe 3y ago

Here is the pointer to the original Eliza paper https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/365153.365168 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/365153.365168 Note that Weizenbaum was an AI critic: Weizenbaum's intention was not for Eliza to pass the Turing test, but to show to people that a clearly not intelligent program based on primitive pattern matching can appear to behave intelligently. He failed: His own secretary wanted to be left alone with the software and typed in her personal problems. Work on Eliza (1963-65, paper published 1966) until today is mostly misunderstood.

leethargo 3y ago
Not only his secretary, also some psychiatrists wanted Eliza as a tool to scale up their work clinically.
- moffkalast 3y ago
  Say, has anyone deployed Hartford's Samantha yet?
adestefan 3y ago
Weizenbaum even wrote an entire book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment To Calculation, on how AI is a crank term for computer science. The basic premise is that humans are not machine so stop using language that treats them as such. Especially that computers can decide what comes next, but only a human can choose what to do. The book also has one of the best and most succinct descriptions of Turing machines and the theoretical underpinning of computer science that I have ever read. Even if you’re an AI maximalist you should read the third chapter of the book.
- stavros 3y ago
  > Especially that computers can decide what comes next, but only a human can choose what to do. I don't understand this, all the programs I've ever written make decisions based on some factors. Are you talking about free will? If so, what is free will?
  - aatd86 3y ago
    Doing things because you can and not because you have to? Creative endeavors in the largest sense?
    - stavros 3y ago
      Does a program have to do things? What can it do? What does a human have to/can do?
      - aatd86 3y ago
        Traditionally, a program is a series of instructions. The program doesn't really act on its own. Now, a program which is objective driven and can infer from new inputs might be something else. Just like humans try to maximize the stability of their structures via a reward system. (it got slighty complex, faulty at times, or the tradeoff between work vs reward is not always in favor of work because we do not control every variable, hence procrastination for example, or addiction which is not a conscious process but neuro-chemically induced).
        stavros 3y ago
        But what does "act on its own" mean? If I give the program some randomness over its next action, is that "acting on its own"? When I'm at work, I act according to a series of instructions. Am I not acting on my own? This is a very philosophical discussion, but if I had an infinitely-powerful computer and could simulate an entire universe based on a series of instructions (physical laws), would the beings in that universe that created societies not be "acting on their own"?
- erikerikson 3y ago
  > humans are not machine Aren't we? Casual chains upon our matter produce emergent behaviors using the same physics and chemistry that our mechanistic creations rely upon. Certainly those behaviors and results do not produce the same repeatable, predictable results as our clockworks but that is the whole point of the field of AI (as opposed to the marketing corruption/term that is currently in vogue, so GAI if you prefer), to produce system and algorithm structures designed with architecture and patterns more like our own. Perhaps you believe in the ghost in the machine hypothesis? The magical soul that is more than the emergent evolving pattern produced across time by DNA replicators? That this undefinable, unmeasurable spirit makes us forever different?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - aftoprokrustes 3y ago
    This is an hypothesis. Of course, it is obvious that a lot of what human/animals are and do can be explained or described by physical processes. But there is the "hard problem of consciousness", to which no one has a satisfying answer. I feel sarcasm in your last paragraph, but it feels rather dishonest, in the sense that you voluntarily use rather crude and ridiculous formulations, as if it was the only alternative. But there is some arrogance in thinking that we, smart as we are, finally got the final answer about one of the hardest questions in philosophy and metaphysics. Materialism is not proven: it is a basic methodological assumption of modern science - meaning that we do not have the tools to either prove or disprove it. Newton, Gödel and lots of other renowed scientists are knowed to have opposed materialism. Let's accept that the question is open. On this topic, I always recommend reading the report of the Galileo Commission, which is a manifesto by a wide range of scientists and philosophers to reduce the stigma associated with even questioning this fundamental dogma.
    - erikerikson 3y ago
      You've written your response thoughtfully, thank you. Of course my description is of a hypothesis rather than ground truth. It turns out that there isn't consensus over whether "The Hard Problem Of Consciousness" is actually a problem[0] but I need to admit I didn't know that before reading your comment. You may have been too kind in your assumption of my competence level on the subject. As adjunct, my writing was about my own currently highest probability expectations rather than a mature reporting of the state of the field of experts. It did not seem worth (then or now) writing to such a standard on a public discussion forum, even this one. My last paragraph wasn't written with sarcasm (sorry to have given easy opportunity to read that in it) but it was a bit rushed, clumsily written, and unimaginative. Poorly written as it was, my curiosity was sincere (its been some time since I engaged with the state of the art) as was some of my dismissal. I have found it common that people have a belief in the uniqueness of humans as a platform for intelligence that frequently has its roots in sentiment and/or unexamined beliefs. Of course there are individuals whose thoughts meet a much higher bar. It is also the case that faith as a basis of belief does not invalidate the belief. There is so much we don't know. We only recently explained how aspirin works[1]. That didn't stop it from working well during our long period of usage prior to our understanding. I'm comfortable with that an its analog here, that I don't understand consciousness and its mechanisms completely. I seem to experience it and it seems to result from what is, despite my incomplete knowledge of what that "what is" comprises. However, there is an imbalance of evidence for the material hypothesis and it seems plausible that emergent dynamics are sufficient to explain. So... Yes, materialism is not proven and yet I currently hold it as the explanation that makes at least a partial contribution to the more complete truth. Further, that it is the explanation with the greatest volume of evidence and support. I suspect that it is sufficient for the emergence of intelligence and even consciousness in ourselves and as such sufficient for (through the same mechanisms) the emergence of intelligence and consciousness in our artificial constructs. Note that I also suspect we are still some distance from that inflection point. Thank you for the reference to the Galileo Commission. I had not heard of it and am always happy to consider new perspectives and challenge those which I have held. [0] https://survey2020.philpeople.org/ https://survey2020.philpeople.org/ [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14592543/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14592543/
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
  Previous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36901158 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36901158 [PDF]
- extractionmech 3y ago
  “Me no likee” - Joseph Agassi This post of yours sent me looking for this and I ended up with (now reading) Agassi’s provocative (& brutal) takedown of this book. As to the content of the book, Agassi pointedly mentioned Weiner. I will of course read Weizenbaum after this. (thanks.) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/286058724_Computer_Power_and_Human_Reason_From_Judgment_to_Calculation https://www.researchgate.net/publication/286058724_Computer_... p.s. continuing on, the review turns very positive. Initial vitriol apparently more related to the “two worlds” matter.
scotty79 3y ago
> He failed I'd say he succeeded. It just seems that people are perfectly content with just appearance of intelligence.
tempodox 3y ago
All this “AI” hype is a constant reminder to me that you cannot reason anybody out of something that they want to believe. People's need to believe in miracles is obviously stronger than all reason.
- ryanklee 3y ago
  > cannot reason anybody out of something that they want to believe. Especially when your own reasons are not the slam dunk you think they are.
  - __loam 3y ago
    Both sides of this debate are competing to see who can post the most snide comments to the other.
    - ryanklee 3y ago
      There is a ton of arrogance everywhere on this subject. Anyone who doesn't see how complicated and nuanced and difficult figuring out what the hell is going on here really needs to sit down and think a little more carefully. There's absolutely no room for out-of-hand dismissal. We are all babes in the woods right now. We need each other, like always.
lulznews 3y ago
Never underestimate human stupidity!
extreme_orang 3y ago
Take a look at this project that has rediscovered and recreated the original ELIZA source code. You can even try out an accurate reimplementation of ELIZA http://findingeliza.org/ http://findingeliza.org/

nbzso 3y ago

So the Turing test actually tests not a technology but the level of intelligence of the user. So, we are doomed, it seems.:)

oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
Definitely the main flaw of the Turing test — having two human actors taking part alongside one computer is just introducing two too many variables :)
masswerk 3y ago
To me, Turing's argument had always been that the attribution of intelligence (or not) doesn't make much sense: rather than being a question of any substance, it merely diffuses into a matter of appearance. However, as things usually are, it had become the holy grail for claiming "intelligence" (which really should be used in this context in quotes only).
__MatrixMan__ 3y ago
He originally made the argument about gender, not intelligence. I think he was arguing for a whole class of properties for which there's no difference between authenticity and convincing fakery. I think the point is less that there is a truth and we're too dumb to figure it out, and more that in certain circumstances we'll just have to accept a lower bar for evidence about whether those properties apply. It reminds me of how no class of computer can solve the halting problem for itself. No matter how intelligent you are, there will be holes like this in your certainty about some things.
- pixl97 3y ago
  Or another way to put this, it's not a binary problem, it's a probability continuum. Even the definition of 'human intelligence' is a continuum from the smartest to the dumbest of us, that doesn't even stop there and descends thought all animal life.
  - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago

master-lincoln 3y ago

> Clearly, Eliza is not an AI Sadly the author doesn't elaborate on this. I thought nowadays 'AI' is a synonym for 'algorithm', which would fit ELIZA Is there an accepted definition of the word AI?

perthmad 3y ago
Any algorithm you do not understand.
- mysterydip 3y ago
  So, any of my own code I haven't looked at for a few months? :)
- throwaway4aday 3y ago
  Including the one in your head.
maweaver 3y ago
Seems like the modern definition is something along the lines of an algorithm whose behavior depends on data which was itself machine generated, rather than hand-created by a human like Eliza's rules.
oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
We've been misusing the term ever since observing the ghosts in Pac Man.

sixothree 3y ago

I remember this being written in basic for the c64. Not sure if I had the real Eliza or a clone. But it was fun to look at all of the canned responses and try to get it to respond with them.

smcameron 3y ago
Probably a variant of the Eliza program in "More BASIC Computer Games", see p. 56 of this PDF: https://ia802707.us.archive.org/33/items/More_BASIC_Computer_Games/More_BASIC_Computer_Games.pdf https://ia802707.us.archive.org/33/items/More_BASIC_Computer...
- sixothree 3y ago
  That's likely the one.

aldousd666 3y ago

Eliza's meant to us to be an illustration of the problem. In good old fashioned AI sentiment, it illustrates the fact that you need another if statement for every new kind of construct you want to simulate. But you deign to simulate each thing, like say turning a verb into a gerund, by writing a specific "gerundification" routine. Another to swap the Mes to Yous, etc. this isn't how people think nor most modern AI. This is totally different from just looking at the world distilling patterns from it and using those patterns as the basis for a response. To teach a modern AI new stuff, you don't have to write another if statement. They have similar intentions and at some resolution or distance, they are trying to do similar things. However, they work and totally different ways and the new dynamic generative AI strategy that learns from input as opposed to just symbolically transforming it syntactically is a totally different paradigm. I don't care whether you call it AI or not.

masswerk 3y ago
With the small reservation that this is not how Eliza works. Eliza sits on top of MAD/SLIP which does all the heavy work and provides lists and integer indexes, which is what is processed by Eliza. This allows Eliza to work on decomposition rules, which isolate keywords per position and context, and transformation (composition) rules to recombine elements and links between those two. Meaning, the model is much more topological than this. (Arguably, this is closer to regular expressions than to if-else trees.) However, this isn't what Eliza is all about. It's rather about the question, how little do you actually need in terms of knowledge, world model, or rule sets to give the impression of an "intelligent" (even sympathetic) participant in a conversation (as long as you're able to constrain the conversation to a setting, which doesn't require any world knowledge, at all.) To a certain degree, it is also about how eager we are to overestimate the capabilities of such a partner in conversation, as soon as some criteria seem to be satisfied. Which is arguably still relevant today. The rule set, BTW, is actually small, just 3 pages in a printout, achieving a surprising generality (or rather, appearance thereof) for its size. Compare: https://cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/572/S02/weizenbaum.eliza.1966.pdf https://cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/572/S02/weizenbaum.eliza.1...
- pixl97 3y ago

seanwilson 3y ago

> One of the first computer programs that successfully passed the Turing test was Eliza. Created in 1966 by Joseph Weizenbaum, Eliza skillfully emulated the speech patterns of a psychotherapist in its conversations. Why was the Turing test still relevant after this? Didn't this indicate it was very flawed test? Or it was hard to come up with a better test?

recursivecaveat 3y ago
I can find no reference of an actual Turing test being done for Eliza. If you look at the link from the article it is clearly demonstrably failing their (different, and more difficult to interpret, but still fair I thiiiink) runs today as well. Note that people constantly willfully misinterpret what a turing test is. A turing test means you enter into two conversations. Then you pick which one was with a computer. If people answer wrong 50% of the time, the computer is indistinguishable, hence it passes. Note that it is not "People get wrong whether their single conversation is talking to an AI >50% of the time" and it is definitely not "sometimes people don't realize they're talking to an AI". In particular people constantly write about the latter because it generates clicks.
canjobear 3y ago
Because Eliza didn’t pass the Turing Test. It is trivially easy to trip it up.
GuB-42 3y ago
The variant of the Turing test that Eliza has passed is the easiest one. That is: convince a novice interrogator that what is on the other side of the screen is a human. The real turing test (the imitation game) involve a computer and a human subject, both talking to a human interrogator. The interrogator must determine who is the human. It is an adverserial situation, both the human subject and interrogator do everything in their power for the interrogator to correctly identify the computer. The computer has to not only convince the interrogator, but also do it better than the human subject. Furthermore, both humans are supposed to be experts in the game, just like the computer that is designed to pass the test. So, not just random people.

throwaway4aday 3y ago

> Interestingly, Eliza still outperforms ChatGPT in certain Turing test variations. I see we have a new entry for the 2024 Lies of Omission award. The article linked to plainly shows that Eliza only beats ChatpGPT-3.5 and is in the bottom half when ranked against a variety of different system prompts. An excellent ass covering strategy that relies on the reader not checking sources. An honest author would have actually quoted the article saying: > GPT-4 achieved a success rate of 41 percent, second only to actual humans. instead of constructing a deliberately misleading paraphrase.

masswerk 3y ago
Hum, note that this was not an argument about or against GPT, but about the "unreasonable" success of a, by all standards, primitive algorithm that manages to get (somewhat) away by crafting the pre- and context of the conversation. By no means, on the other hand, could I read this article and understand it as claiming any superiority over modern applications. (Nobody with even the crudest understanding of the principles of Eliza could claim this, and the article clearly demonstrates a detailed understanding. Disclaimer: I wrote the JS implementation linked in the article, many years ago.) Edit: The question rightfully raised – and answered – by Eliza, which is still relevant today in the context of GPT, is: does the appearance of intelligent conversation (necessarily) hint at the presence of a world model in any rudimentary form?
- throwaway4aday 3y ago
  Several people in this thread appear to have misunderstood due to the way this article was written.
notahacker 3y ago
"GPT-4 achieved a success rate of 41 percent, second only to actual humans" also feels like a (much bigger) lie of omission looking at the original paper. GPT4's performance was in the range of 6% to 41%, Eliza's 27% score sat in the upper middle of that range, and considering the bots tested consisted of 8 GPT4 prompts, 2 GPT3.5 prompts and a naive script from the 1960s, GPT4 would have had to be remarkably consistently inhuman not to finish "second only to humans" with its highest scoring prompt The blog appears to have been updated to specify GPT3.5, but the original version was accurate. The paper itself is interesting as it covers the limitations (it has big methodological issues), how the GPT prompts attempted to overridei default chatGPT tone and reasons why ELIZA performed surprisingly well (some thought it was so uncooperative, it must be human!) https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.20216.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.20216.pdf

dboreham 3y ago

It turns out, 50 years later, that Eliza was on the right track.

acidburnNSA 3y ago

So was Eliza from 1966 more intelligent than Dr SBAITSO from 1990? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Sbaitso https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Sbaitso

the_af 3y ago
Wasn't SBAITSO pretty much the same idea as Eliza, only using speech synthesis with a Soundblaster?
- acidburnNSA 3y ago
  Yes. I'm surprised to hear Eliza passed a turing test. SBAITSO was fun but pretty clearly not a human.
  - NavinF 3y ago
    Eliza never passed a turing test. Nobody tried to test Eliza because they knew what the result would be
    - acidburnNSA 3y ago
      I'm responding to the quote in TFA: > One of the first computer programs that successfully passed the Turing test was Eliza. I haven't studied the history of it.
      - the_af 3y ago
        Mentioned in arstechnica to my surprise, but do note the paper wasn't peer reviewed and they mention flaws in the methodology. I cannot believe anyone passingly familiar with ELIZA would be fooled by it.

scotty79 3y ago

Can one see original Eliza sourcode anywhere?

proamdev123 3y ago
There is a version of it in Emacs, called up with `M-x doctor`. The source is in `doctor.el`. https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsDoctor https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsDoctor
RugnirViking 3y ago
We had it running in terminals when I used to work in the national museum of computing in the UK (on machines where you can just pull the full source up from floppy disk)
DonHopkins 3y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27332340 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27332340 DonHopkins on May 30, 2021 | prev | next [–] Here's the source code for Kent Pitman's "DOCTOR" in MACLISP, which was of course inspired by ELIZA. (Joseph Weizenbaum taught Kent Pitman LISP!) https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/master/src/games/doc.102 https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/master/src/games/doc.102 And here's what happened with he (manually by typing) hooked it up with Kenneth Colby's "PARRY" (the paranoid patient): https://www.maclisp.info/pitmanual/funnies.html https://www.maclisp.info/pitmanual/funnies.html >Parrying Programs >I didn't write the original ELIZA program, although my Lisp class was taught by Joseph Weizenbaum, who did. I later wrote a very elaborate program of similar kind, which I just called DOCTOR, in order to play with some of the ideas. >At some point, I noticed there was a program at Stanford called PARRY (the paranoid patient), by Kenneth Colby. I understand from Wikipedia's PARRY entry that Weizenbaum's ELIZA and PARRY were connected at one point, although I never saw that. I never linked PARRY with my DOCTOR directly, but I did once do it indirectly through a manual typist. Part of my record of this exchange was garbled, but this is a partial transcript, picking up in the middle. Mostly it just shows PARRY was a better patient than my DOCTOR program was a doctor. >I have done light editing to remove the typos we made (rubbed out characters were echoed back in square brackets). >Also, I couldn't find documentation to confirm this, but my belief has always been that the numeric values after each line are PARRY's level of Shame (SH), Anger (AN), Fear (FR), Disgust (DS), Insecurity (IN), and Joy (J).—KMP [...] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38402813 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38402813 DonHopkins 44 days ago | parent | context | favorite | on: The Revival of Medley/Interlisp That's right, it's just a throw-away quip, but if you want the deep nuanced story and inside history of Common Lisp and comparison with Scheme, Kent Pitman is the one to read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_Pitman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_Pitman Index of Kent Pitman's Papers: https://www.nhplace.com/kent/Papers/ https://www.nhplace.com/kent/Papers/ Scheme or Lisp? Kent M Pitman explains the deep philosophical differences. https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6fa5r/scheme_or_lisp_kent_m_pitman_explains_the_deep/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6fa5r/scheme_o... Kent Pitman on Scheme or Lisp?: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.lisp/c/TEk4O4-zsA8/m/HLonoeiFG4cJ https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.lisp/c/TEk4O4-zsA8/m/H... Common Lisp: The Untold Story: https://www.nhplace.com/kent/Papers/cl-untold-story.html https://www.nhplace.com/kent/Papers/cl-untold-story.html Why Wolfram Mathematica did not use Lisp (2002) (ymeme.com): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9797936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9797936 https://web.archive.org/web/20110122140154/http://www.ymeme.com/why-wolfram-(mathematica)-did-not-use-lisp.html https://web.archive.org/web/20110122140154/http://www.ymeme.... Kent Pitman's essay on why lisp doesn't have copying of lists. https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.lisp/c/MmtQreo3PCM https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.lisp/c/MmtQreo3PCM Parenthetically Speaking with Kent Pitman: The Best Intentions: EQUAL Rights -- And Wrongs -- In Lisp: https://www.nhplace.com/kent/PS/EQUAL.html https://www.nhplace.com/kent/PS/EQUAL.html Kent M. Pitman Answers On Lisp And Much More: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/01/11/03/1726251/kent-m-pitman-answers-on-lisp-and-much-more https://developers.slashdot.org/story/01/11/03/1726251/kent-... Kent M. Pitman's Second Wind: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/01/11/13/0420226/kent-m-pitmans-second-wind https://developers.slashdot.org/story/01/11/13/0420226/kent-... Tutorial on Good Lisp Programming Style: Peter Norvig, Sun Microsystems Labs Inc; Kent Pitman, Harlequin Inc.: https://www.cs.umd.edu/~nau/cmsc421/norvig-lisp-style.pdf https://www.cs.umd.edu/~nau/cmsc421/norvig-lisp-style.pdf Notes from the ANSI standardisation process: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/72414053/notes-from-the-ansi-standardisation-process https://stackoverflow.com/questions/72414053/notes-from-the-... Issue CLOS-CONDITIONS Writeup: https://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lw50/CLHS/Issues/iss049_w.htm https://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lw50/CLHS/Issues/iss... On Pitman's “Special forms in Lisp” (2011) (kazimirmajorinc.com): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29947329 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29947329 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29954993 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29954993 DonHopkins on Jan 16, 2022 | parent | next [–] Kent Pitman also wrote the "Revised Maclisp Manual (Saturday Evening Edition)" aka the "Pitmanual". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_A._Moon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_A._Moon http://www.nhplace.com/kent/publications.html http://www.nhplace.com/kent/publications.html >In 1983, I finished the multi-year task of writing The Revised Maclisp Manual (Saturday Evening Edition), sometimes known as The Pitmanual, and published it as a Technical Report at MIT's Lab for Computer Science. In 2007, I finished dusting that document off and published it to the web as the Sunday Morning Edition. http://www.maclisp.info/pitmanual/ http://www.maclisp.info/pitmanual/ Not to be confused with David Moon who wrote the "MacLISP Reference Manual" aka the "Moonual", and who co-authored the "Lisp Machine Manual" with Richard Stallman and Daniel Weinreb, which had big bold lettering that ran around the spine and back of the cover, so it was known as the "LISP CHINE NUAL" (reading only letters on the front). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15185827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15185827 https://hanshuebner.github.io/lmman/title.xml https://hanshuebner.github.io/lmman/title.xml https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15186998 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15186998 DonHopkins on Sept 6, 2017 | next [–] The cover of the Lisp Machine Manual had the title printed in all caps diagonally wrapped around the spine, so on the front you could only read "LISP CHINE NUAL". So the title was phonetically pronounced: "Lisp Sheen Nual". My friend Nick made a run of custom silkscreened orange LISP CHINE NUAL t-shirts (most places won't print around the side like that). https://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lw50/CLHS/Issues/iss049_w.htm https://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lw50/CLHS/Issues/iss... I was wearing mine in Amsterdam at Dappermarkt on Queen's Day (when everyone's supposed to wear orange, so I didn't stand out), and some random hacker (who turned out to be a university grad student) came up to me at random and said he recognized my t-shirt! http://www.textfiles.com/hacking/hakdic.txt http://www.textfiles.com/hacking/hakdic.txt CHINE NUAL (sheen'yu-:l) noun. The reference manual for the Lisp Machine, a computer designed at MIT especially for running the LISP language. It is called this because the title, LISP MACHINE MANUAL, appears in big block letters -- wrapped around the cover in such a way that you have to open the cover out flat to see the whole thing. If you look at just the front cover, you see only part of the title, and it reads "LISP CHINE NUAL" toomanybeersies on Sept 7, 2017 | parent | next [–] Link to an image of the manual, for the lazy: https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/101/264672507_307376d26c_z.jpg https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/101/264672507_307376d26c_z.jpg [...] ;;; Notes about CLI interrupts and eval-in-other-lisp: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20267415 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20267415 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38061207 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38061207 >Here's Kent Pittman's :TEACH;LISP from ITS, which is a MACLISP program that teaches you how to program in MACLISP. (That's "Man And Computer Lisp" from "Project MAC", not "Macintosh Lisp".)

nsajko 3y ago

The article is missing the interesting bits, so here are the relevant Wikipedia pages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Weizenbaum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Weizenbaum

drakonka 3y ago

Many years ago I spent a lot of time on a website called Personality Forge, where you would create chat bots very similar to this and set them loose. They could then talk to other people or each other and you could review the transcripts. At one point I even entered my chat bot in The Chatterbox Challenge. It was so much fun to work on this thing at the time, but when I rediscovered it years later[0] I was mostly just disappointed in how "fake" all that effort was. Now here I am talking about life, the universe, and everything with ChatGPT. It makes me both inexplicably happy/hopeful and simultaneously weirdly melancholic. [0] https://liza.io/its-not-so-bad.-we-have-snail-babies-after-all/ https://liza.io/its-not-so-bad.-we-have-snail-babies-after-a...

bee_rider 3y ago
The great thing about being a teenager or kid is that you don’t know why the grownups don’t think your project is worth doing, so you just do it. Even if it doesn’t change the world (most things don’t, after all) you can still learn something and have fun.

ShamelessC 3y ago

I am irrationally upset about the title.

jamesdwilson 3y ago
Right there with you. I try to internally read it and get flustered every time.

whoopdedo 3y ago

Then later on there was Azile[1], the evil twin to Eliza. Instead of being trained with data to make it sound helpful and supportive, it uses hostile and insulting language. [1] https://www.civilizr.com/communication/azile-chatbot-savage-af-ai/ https://www.civilizr.com/communication/azile-chatbot-savage-...

deepfriedrice 3y ago

I'm stoked to be learning about the real Eliza, after being surreptitiously exposed via the Zachtronics game [0]. The game has a fascinating dystopian/scifi take where a company provides AI therapy through human "proxies" that simply vocalize the AI response. [0] https://www.zachtronics.com/eliza/ https://www.zachtronics.com/eliza/

ilaksh 3y ago

In a very rough sense, it actually seems more similar to what LLMs are doing than I would have assumed. That might mainly be because they are both attempting to generate more text from an input.