Take a Turing Test?.........no problem

[Guest guest]

Have you ever considered taking a Turing test?

;-)

 

Sure I did. I sat at one point of an IRC channel, and someone tested

me. Eventually it was discovered that I am a computer, but it turned

out the other side was an Eliza program. Strangely enough, I could

not detect that the latter fact was true.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ELIZA is a famous 1966 computer program by Joseph Weizenbaum, which

parodied a Rogerian therapist, largely by rephrasing many of the

patient's statements as questions and posing them to the patient.

Thus, for example, the response to " My head hurts " might be " Would

you like some advil? " The response to " My mother hates me " might

be " Why do you think your mother hates you? "

 

It is sometimes inaccurately said that ELIZA " simulates " (or

worse, " emulates " ) a therapist. Weizenbaum said that ELIZA provided

a " parody " of " the responses of a nondirectional psychotherapist in

an initial psychiatric interview. " He chose the context of

psychotherapy to " sidestep the problem of giving the program a data

base of real-world knowledge " , the therapeutic situation being one of

the few real human situations in which a human being can reply to a

statement with a question that indicates very little specific

knowledge of the topic under discussion. For example, it is a context

in which the question " Who is your favorite composer? " can be

answered acceptably with responses such as " What about your own

favorite composer? " or " Does that question interest you? "

 

Eliza worked by simple parsing and substitution of key words into

canned phrases. Depending upon the initial entries by the user the

illusion of a human writer could be instantly dispelled, or could

continue through several interchanges. It was sometimes so convincing

that there are many anecdotes about people becoming very emotionally

caught up in dealing with ELIZA for several minutes until the

machine's true lack of understanding became apparent. All this was

due to people's tendency to attach to words meanings which the

computer never put there.

 

ELIZA impacted a number of early computer games by demonstrating

additional kinds of interface designs. Don Daglow wrote an enhanced

version of the program called Ecala on a PDP-10 mainframe computer at

Pomona College in 1973 before writing the first computer Role Playing

Game, Dungeon (1975). It is likely that ELIZA was also on the system

where Will Crowther created Adventure, the 1975 game that spawned the

interactive fiction genre. But both these games appeared some nine

years after the original ELIZA.

 

In 1966, interactive computing (via a teletype) was new. It was 15

years before the personal computer became familiar to the general

public, and two decades before most people encountered attempts at

natural language processing in Internet services like Ask.com or PC

help systems such as Microsoft Office Clippy. Although those programs

included years of research and work (while Ecala eclipsed the

functionality of ELIZA after less than two weeks of work by a single

programmer), ELIZA remains a milestone simply because it was the

first time a programmer had attempted such a human-machine

interaction with the goal of creating the illusion (however brief) of

human-human interaction.

 

Lay responses to ELIZA were disturbing to Weizenbaum and motivated

him to write his book Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment

to Calculation, in which he explains the limits of computers, as he

wants to make clear in people's minds his opinion that the

anthropomorphic views of computers are just a reduction of the human

being and any lifeform for that matter.

 

ELIZA was named after Eliza Doolittle, the working-class character in

Shaw's Pygmalion who is taught to speak with an upper class accent.

 

There are many programs based on ELIZA in different languages in

addition to Ecala. For example, in 1980, a company called " Don't Ask

Software " , founded by Randy Simon, created a version for the Apple

II, Atari, and Commodore PCs, which verbally abused the user based on

the user's input. In Spain, Jordi Perez developed the famous ZEBAL in

1993, written in Clipper for MS-DOS.