Who Made ELIZA Possible?

Abstract and 1. Introduction

2. Why ELIZA?
3. The Intelligence Engineers
4. Newell, Shaw, and Simon’s IPL Logic Theorist: The First True AIs
5. From IPL to SLIP and Lisp
6. A Critical Tangent into Gomoku
7. Interpretation is the Core of Intelligence
8. The Threads Come Together: Interpretation, Language, Lists, Graphs, and Recursion
9. Finally ELIZA: A Platform, Not a Chat Bot!
10. A Perfect Irony: A Lisp ELIZA Escapes and is Misinterpreted by the AI Community
11. Another Wave: A BASIC ELIZA turns the PC Generation on to AI
12. Conclusion: A certain danger lurks there
13. Acknowledgements and References

This paper developed through extensive discussions over several years with “Team ELIZA”, including Anthony Hay, Art Schwarz, Sarah Ciston, Peggy Weil, Peter Millican, David Berry, and Mark Marino. I am especially indebted to Anthony Hay and Art Schwarz for detailed discussion about technical aspects of ELIZA and SLIP, such as how symbol manipulation worked in SLIP. Terry Winograd and John Markoff participated in helpful background discussions, and Anne Rawls and Clemens Eisenmann provided access to the Garfinkel archives, and Andrei Korbut introduced us to them. Many anonymous commenters in the Hacker News community helped clarify concepts, and provided additional pointers to information that I could not have easily discovered on my own. I am especially indebted to the MIT Archivists, Myles Crowley, Mikki Macdonald, and Allison Schmitt.

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:::info Author:

(1) Jeff Shrager, Blue Dot Change and Stanford University Symbolic Systems Program (Adjunct)( [email protected]).

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:::info This paper is available on arxiv under CC BY 4.0 license.

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