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The Question

  1. 01The Question
  2. 02The machines arrive
  3. 03The uncomfortable question
  4. 04A peculiar habit of mind
  5. 05What Turing had already built
  6. 06Unsatisfied
  7. 07What does it mean to think?
  8. 08The definition problem
  9. 09The Imitation Game
  10. 10Why this sidesteps the problem
  11. 11Why this was radical
  12. 12Meet ELIZA
  13. 13What did you notice?
  14. 14The question is still open
  15. 15Reinforce your understanding
  16. 16Question: Turing's move
  17. 17Question: Behavior
  18. 18Question: Limits of the test
  19. 19Quiz: answer
  20. 20The question follows you
  21. 21Want to go deeper?
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Meet ELIZA

In 1966, sixteen years after Turing's paper, a computer scientist at named Joseph Weizenbaum built a program called ELIZA. It could hold a conversation. The person on the other end didn't know they were talking to a machine.

Here is a real exchange from Weizenbaum's original paper. See if you can spot the machine.

Question

Which one is ELIZA?

The colored text. It wasn't understanding anything. It was scanning for keywords and reflecting them back. No learning. No model of the world. Just pattern matching on text. The person typing believed they were being heard.
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Citations(2)↓
  1. 1. cse.buffalo.edu
  2. 2. web.njit.edu
Citations(2)↓
  1. 1. cse.buffalo.edu
  2. 2. web.njit.edu