Schwarz, Arthur
ELIZA Reanimated: The world's first chatbot restored on the world's first time sharing system
Lane, Rupert, Hay, Anthony, Schwarz, Arthur, Berry, David M., Shrager, Jeff
ELIZA Reanimated: The world's first chatbot restored on the world's first time sharing system Abstract ELIZA, created by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT in the early 1960s, is usually considered the world's first chatbot. It was developed in MAD-SLIP on MIT's CTSS, the world's first time-sharing system, on an IBM 7094. We discovered an original ELIZA printout in Prof. Weizenbaum's archives at MIT, including an early version of the famous DOCTOR script, a nearly complete version of the MAD-SLIP code, and various support functions in MAD and FAP. Here we describe the reanimation of this original ELIZA on a restored CTSS, itself running on an emulated IBM 7094. The entire stack is open source, so that any user of a unix-like OS can run the world's first chatbot on the world's first time-sharing system. "We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done." If Alan Turing was AI's founding father, Ada Lovelace may well have been its founding mother. Over a century before Turning famously proposed using the Imitation Game to determine whether a computer is intelligent [34], Lady Lovelace described the potential of Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine to "act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine."[27] Ada's prescient insight that machines could act upon entities besides numbers foreshadowed symbolic computing which, in the 1950s, a mere moment after Turing's famous paper, arose, and remains today, one of the foundations of artificial intelligence[28].