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and was written by Joseph Weizenbaum is the most famous example of this sort of thing. There was also a program by Kenneth Colby, called “Parry” which simulated paranoid behaviour. Douglas Hofstadter quoted in “Godel Escher Bach” from a “conversation” between two machines, one running each program, which went in part as follows:

An enormous understatement at the end there. In fact, all the programs were doing was scanning the input for recognised words and producing a reply to fit them, from a selection of possible replies. A program to do just this sort of thing, called “Eliza”, was printed in the ancient publication from the dawn of time, “Nascom BASIC Programs”. It was very effective, but it never learned anything new.

Slightly more recently, I converted and improved the old “Eliza” program so that the user could teach it new replies. That program was written in EBASIC, a language that came with early copies of CP/M, and I once sold three copies of it. Our Editor has suggested that a disk library might be a useful addition to the services he provides, so I shall be sending him these ancient, creaking programs in the hope that people will want them, either as examples of pitfalls to avoid, or a foundation to build on. My version of the program makes the same “I/me” mistake as every version I have ever seen, and (I love it when I get to say this one) I leave it as an exercise for anyone who gets hold of the program to remove this long lived bug…

One application of these conversation imitating programs that I thought of a while ago, while planning what facilities to include in the Prestel software I was going to write, was a version of the program that would scan all the new frames appearing on a Micronet Chatline, and if they started with the word “Marvin”, a reply would be generated, and sent to the Prestel computer. Alas, this particular software project has gone halfway to completion twice now, and the two halves are both first halves and won’t work together. I have, however, learned quite a lot. about how to plan large programming projects ! In the meantime, anyone who wants to amend their Prestel software to carry out this strange idea can help themselves. When one considers some of the conversations that actually appear on the Chatlines, it is possible that this has already been done !