ELIZA for PC and Mac

1. Since then, Artifical Intelligence has made remarkable progress, but it is interesting to see what these early programs were able to achieve, with fractions of the computing power of a modern smart phone.

2. ELIZA is an early natural language processing program created between 1964 and 1966 at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory by Joseph Weizenbaum.

3. This presentation is a revival of the port I made back then in AppleSoft Basic on my own Microsoft //e with the very same green screen, and the very same floppy drives.

4. Developed by Alan Turing in 1950, it evaluates the PC's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human.

5. Eliza simulated a conversation betwen man and PC, by using a system of keywords and scripts meant to react to them.

6. This app is based on a BASIC listing published by Steve North in Creative Computing back in 1986.

7. I simply regret not to be able to locate any original sound of the PC (35 years ago !) for a complete ambiance.

8. But the idea, here, is not to have more features, but rather, to grasp this historical part of natural language computer interaction.

9. It was quoted at the time of being able to pass the Turing Test.

10. This is an important piece of history for whomever is interested in computing culture.

11. If anyone could send the author the source of that program, it will be great to do a "TRS-80" version.