Scientists have brought ELIZA to life, the world’s first Chatbot

On December 21, 2024, just before 2 p.m., scientists made the dead speak. Eliza, the world’s first chatbot He’s back. ELIZA has long been imitated, but never replicated so perfectly, in a long time. But scientists discovered an early version of its code in its creator’s archives in 2021 and have spent the intervening years piecing it back together.

ELIZA has been revived and so can you Download it here To see for yourself.

Coded and iterated from 1964 to 1967, ELIZA was developed by MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum. Primitive by today’s standards, ELIZA was a huge success at the time of its creation. He gave her the persona of a psychotherapist and his secretary was so enamored with her that she asked Weizenbaum to leave the room when she was talking to him.

A New scientific paper Members of the ELIZA Archeology Project detail how the chatbot was found and revived as well as its origins and subsequent publication. Weizenbaum programmed ELIZA in an early language called MAD-SLIP on a time-sharing computer system called the Compatible Time-Sharing System, or CTSS.

Eliza quickly turned away from Weisenbaum. As it spread across early computer networks, programmers modified it into other languages. One of these early versions was created in Lisp by one of the technical leaders of ARPAnet, the precursor to the modern Internet. The Lisp version of Eliza was one of the first pieces of data on this nascent network and spread quickly.

“As a result, Cosell’s Lisp ELIZA version quickly became the dominant strain, leaving Weizenbaum’s MAD-SLIP version, invisible to the ARPAnet, to history,” the newspaper said. “Until its rediscovery in 2021, the original MAD-SLIP ELIZA had not been seen for at least 50 years.”

A decade later, a magazine called Creative Computing published a version of ELIZA written in BASIC. That was in 1977, the same year the Apple II, Commodore Pet, and TRS-80 hit the market. These machines led to a boom in home computing and the spread of the basic computing language.

“And perhaps a few of these amateurs were not interested enough in the possibility of an AI writing BASIC ELIZA (which was just a few pages of code) and trying it themselves,” the scientists said. “Because of its brevity and simplicity, and the explosion of the personal computer, ELIZA has spawned hundreds of copycats over the decades, in every conceivable programming language, making it perhaps the most imitated program in history/Just as Cosell’s Lisp ELIZA spread through ARPANet, BASIC ELIZA spread through Explosive infection for personal computers.

There are countless versions of this basic version of ELIZA online at the moment, and the original MAD-SLIP version has long been thought to be lost to history. Then Stanford computer scientist Jeff Schrager convinced archivists at MIT to dig through boxes of Weizenbaum’s material, and they made an important discovery: early versions of the MAD-SLIP code.

The code was incomplete, and it took a lot of modifications and complex simulations to get it working again. “It required numerous steps to clean up and complete the code, install the emulator stack and debug, non-trivial debugging of the existing code itself, and even write some completely new functions that were not found in the archives or in available MAD and SLIP implementations,” the paper said.

It took a lot of time and effort, but code archaeologists got ELIZA working again and made it available for anyone to play with. “This has been tested on different versions of Linux and MacOS, but we noticed some issues with different versions, so your mileage may vary,” they said in the paper. “If you run it on your device and find you have to change something, let us know.”