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].

ELIZA, often considered the world's first chatbot, was written by Joseph Weizenbaum in the early 1960s. Weizenbaum did not intend to invent the chatbot, but rather to build a platform for research into human-machine conversation and the important cognitive processes of interpretation and misinterpretation. His purpose was obscured by ELIZA's fame, resulting in large part from the fortuitous timing of it's creation, and it's escape into the wild. In this paper I provide a rich historical context for ELIZA's creation, demonstrating that ELIZA arose from the intersection of some of the central threads in the technical history of AI. I also briefly discuss how ELIZA escaped into the world, and how its accidental escape, along with several coincidental turns of the programming language screws, led both to the misapprehension that ELIZA was intended as a chatbot, and to the loss of the original ELIZA to history for over 50 years.

From an AI perspective, finding effective treatments for cancer is a high-dimensional search problem characterized by many molecularly distinct cancer subtypes, many potential targets and drug combinations, and a dearth of high quality data to connect molecular subtypes and treatments to responses. The broadening availability of molecular diagnostics and electronic medical records, presents both opportunities and challenges to apply AI techniques to personalize and improve cancer treatment. We discuss these in the context of Cancer Commons, a "rapid learning" community where patients, physicians, and researchers collect and analyze the molecular and clinical data from every cancer patient, and use these results to individualize therapies. Research opportunities include: adaptively-planning and executing individual treatment experiments across the whole patient population, inferring the causal mechanisms of tumors, predicting drug response in individuals, and generalizing these findings to new cases.

Cancer kills millions of people each year. From an AI perspective, finding effective treatments for cancer is a high-dimensional search problem characterized by many molecularly distinct cancer subtypes, many potential targets and drug combinations, and a dearth of high quality data to connect molecular subtypes and treatments to responses. The broadening availability of molecular diagnostics and electronic medical records, presents both opportunities and challenges to apply AI techniques to personalize and improve cancer treatment. We discuss these in the context of Cancer Commons, a “rapid learning” community where patients, physicians, and researchers collect and analyze the molecular and clinical data from every cancer patient, and use these results to individualize therapies. Research opportunities include: adaptively-planning and executing individual treatment experiments across the whole patient population, inferring the causal mechanisms of tumors, predicting drug response in individuals, and generalizing these findings to new cases. The goal is to treat each patient in accord with the best available knowledge, and to continually update that knowledge to benefit subsequent patients. Achieving this goal is a worthy grand challenge for AI.