

The program was limited by the scripts that were in the program. Using "'pattern matching" and substitution methodology, the program gives canned responses that made early users feel they were talking to someone who understood their input. But, when it was put on personal computers, humans found it quite engaging.

It supposedly had been created to demonstrate how superficial human to computer communications was at that time. This early natural language processing program had been written in the mid-1960s at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory by Joseph Weizenbaum. By then, ELIZA was a software tween herself. I first encountered ELIZA on the Tandy/Radio Shack computers that made up the first computer lab in the junior high school where I taught in the 1970s. Talk to Eliza by typing your questions and answers in the input box.
