Coding Challenge #89 - ELIZA

This challenge is to build your own version of the original AI chatbot - ELIZA!

ELIZA is an early natural language processing computer program developed by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT between 1964 to 1967. Eliza was created to explore communication between humans and machines. To do that ELIZA simulated conversations by using pattern matching and substitution methodologies that created an illusion of understanding on the part of ELIZA.

Weizenbaum was surprised to find that some people attributed human-like feelings to the ELIZA a phenomenon that came to be called the ELIZA effect. I can understand why people did this, when I first came across ELIZA as a child in the 1980s I was blown away at how human it seemed, particularly compared to the computers I was used to dealing with.

Given how many early users were convinced of ELIZA's intelligence and understanding, despite Weizenbaum's insistence to the contrary it’s no surprise people confuse the far more capable and advanced modern LLM based systems for intelligence.

Arthur C. Clark was right when he said:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

The Challenge - Building ELIZA

ELIZA was the worlds first chatbot. Some people considered it part of the early AI work as it is doing natural language processing (NLP). As we’ll see there is no intelligence, simply an algorithm designed to mimic it using some relatively simple rules.

If you’ve never used ELIZA before you can give it a go on the ELIZA Archaeology site.

Step Zero

Coding Challenges is zero-based, just like all good programming languages. As we’re building the first ever chatbot, zero seems like a great place to start!

Please set up your IDE / editor and programming language of choice and proceed directly to Step 1 once you’re ready.

Step 1

In this step your goal is to display a welcome banner and prompt the user for input. For now just print the input back out so you can test your program.

You should allow the user to quit if they type a response that would end the conversation, for example: quit, goodbye, or bye.

Continued...

You can find the rest of this coding challenge on the substack post: https://open.substack.com/pub/codingchallenges/p/coding-challenge-89-eliza?r=gjveo&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true