Eliza: the ancestor of AI returns from the dead
If we asked you when the first chatbot was created, what would your answer be? Like us (let’s admit), you might have hazarded a “in the 80s?”. Well, imagine, Eliza is a lot older than that. This first name is that of the very first chatbot in history, officially presented by its creator Joseph Weizenbaum in 1966. The venerable entity returns to the forefront today, as part of a restoration project.
© Les Numériques / image generated by AI
Started in 2021, upon the discovery of the original source code discovered in the MIT archives, this project proved to be particularly complex, according to the researchers who worked on it. They had to dissect thousands of lines of poorly documented code and reconstruct missing functions. It must be said that the chatbot was initially developed in MAD-SLIP language on MIT's CTSS, the first time-sharing system in the world, on an IBM 7094. The restored version works precisely on an emulator of this IBM 7094.
The DOCTOR program, the heart of the Eliza system, simulates a therapist by reproducing the techniques of Rogerian psychotherapy. Before this discovery, only modern recreations of the program were available.
Unexpected discoveries
During the restoration process, the team made several surprising finds. A hidden “teaching mode” allows users to customize Eliza's behavior by tapping the “+” symbol. This feature was only briefly mentioned by Joseph Weizenbaum in a 1966 publication.
Before this restoration, the Eliza chatbot had not completely disappeared and had persisted through some emulations.
The researchers also kept an original bug: Eliza systematically crashes when users enter numbers. This decision was made to preserve the historical authenticity of the program, with 96% of the code remaining identical to the original. Eliza's restored code is now available on GitHub, allowing anyone to download the program and its emulator.
Eliza's Legacy in Modern AI
Beyond her status as the first chatbot in history, it is above all as a pioneer of artificial intelligence that Eliza is remembered. Of course, this discipline was only in its infancy in the 1960s. But Eliza still, voluntarily or not, explored the trail of a different approach to artificial intelligence. Recent OpenAI models follow the same trend: rather than exactly replicating human cognition, they seek to achieve similar results through other means. In any case, Eliza represents the first incarnation of the Turing test, introducing a revolutionary concept for the time: the possibility of conversation between humans and computers. Sixty years later, this concept remains at the heart of developments in artificial intelligence.
