A Simulation in C++ of Joseph Weizenbaum's 1966 Eliza

Joseph Weizenbaum’s 1966 ELIZA recreated in C++ I’ve made in C++ what I think is an accurate simulation of the original ELIZA. It is a console application that takes as input the original format script file, which looks like a series of S-expressions, and then waits for the user to type a line of text before responding with a line of text of its own. ELIZA is a chatbot—the first chatbot—written between 1964-1966 by Joseph Weizenbaum, Professor of Electrical Engineering at MIT, and part-supported by the US Department of Defence Project MAC. It is configured via a "script," the most famous of which is called DOCTOR. The script contains simple pattern matching rules that ELIZA uses to reflect back parts of the text typed in by the user. Weizenbaum's purpose was not to advance our understanding of intelligence, but to create the illusion that ELIZA understood what had been said to it in order to demonstrate how easily people can be fooled. I made this before the ELIZA source code had be ... Read full article.