ELIZA — Joseph Weizenbaum, MIT, 1964–1966.
ELIZA was the first conversational program to give the convincing illusion of understanding. Weizenbaum wrote it to demonstrate the superficiality of natural-language exchange between humans and machines — and was unsettled when his secretary asked him to leave the room so she could talk to it in private.
The most famous script, DOCTOR, parodies a Rogerian psychotherapist: it reflects the user's statements back as questions, latches onto emotional keywords, and falls back to generic prompts when no rule fires. It has no memory, no model of the user, no goals — just pattern-substitution rules and a sleight of attention.
This dashboard's ELIZA is a faithful reimplementation of the DOCTOR script in Python (eliza_chat.py). The decomposition patterns, keyword priorities, and response banks follow Weizenbaum's original 1966 CACM paper. Conversations are kept only in memory and discarded when you reload.
Try saying: "I feel anxious." / "My mother always told me…" / "You don't understand me."
— Where mind is, there ELIZA seems to be.