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Rebuilding ELIZA, the "Mother of All Chatbots" [1]
['Rob Beschizza']
Date: 2025-06-20
In an age of language learning models and chatbots, passing the Turing test is light work with most correspondents. But the first such machine to win the imitation game was ELIZA, programmed in the mid-1960s by Joseph Wiezenbaum at MIT. In ELIZA Reanimated: Restoring the Mother of All Chatbots to One of the World's First Time-Sharing Systems, a team of researchers reconstructed the original ELIZA to run on MIT's original time-sharing system on an emulated IBM 7094 mainframe.
The combination of MAD and SLIP that constitutes the ELIZA stack is around 2,600 lines of mostly uncommented MAD and FAP code. Getting this into machine-readable format was nontrivial; it did not OCR well, so Anthony Hay and Art Schwarz manually transcribed it. Hay had previously done a careful analysis of the algorithm and DOCTOR script as described in the original 1966 paper and wrote a C++ version of ELIZA that is, so far as we know, the best clone of the original . Schwarz had worked with SLIP for many years and is the author of the GNU SLIP library. Their expertise was invaluable in navigating the code.
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