World's first chatbot 'ELIZA' ressurected from 60-year-old computer code

The world’s first chatbot “ELIZA” has just been resurrected from long-lost computer code by the scientists and it still works extremely well.

These "software archaeologists" discovered defunct code that had been lost for 60 years and brought it back to life by using dusty printouts from MIT archives, reported Live Science.

By MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum, ELIZA was developed in the 1960s and named after Eliza Doolittle, the protagonist of the play "Pygmalion," who was taught how to speak like an aristocratic British woman.

The researchers wrote in a paper posted to the preprint database arXiv Sunday, that as a language model that the user could interact with, ELIZA had a significant impact on today’s artificial intelligence (AI).

Weizenbaum wrote ELIZA in a now-defunct programming language he invented, called Michigan Algorithm Decoder Symmetric List Processor (MAD-SLIP), but it was almost immediately copied into the language Lisp.

The Lisp version of ELIZA went viral with the advent of the early internet and the original version became obsolete.

When study co-author Jeff Shrager, a cognitive scientist at Stanford University, and Myles Crowley, an MIT archivist, found it among Weizenbaum's papers, experts thought the original 420-line ELIZA code was lost until 2021.