Earlier this yr, the expertise world welcomed again a long-lost good friend. ELIZA, the world’s first synthetic intelligence chatbot, had wowed the computer scientists of the mid-Sixties with its skill to interact in seemingly significant dialog. But, for many years, ELIZA was thought-about misplaced as a result of its creator – Joseph Weizenbaum on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – by no means printed the 420 traces of code he used to create it.
“At that point, it was truly form of not regular to publish code,” says Jeffrey Shrager at Stanford University in California. Weizenbaum may even have thought that no person would discover it notably attention-grabbing.
How occasions have modified: Shrager and his colleagues are so fascinated by Weizenbaum’s achievement that they based the ELIZA Archaeology Project and commenced digging into the historical past of the traditional chatbot. A couple of years in the past, their efforts have been rewarded once they found the lacking code in a field of Weizenbaum’s outdated paperwork at MIT, paving the way in which for ELIZA’s current resurrection.
It is astonishing that we will as soon as once more discuss to a chatbot that occupies such an essential place within the historical past of AI. It acquired me questioning: is the ELIZA code the oldest on the market, or are there even older snippets of computer code still performing spectacular or essential duties? My journey looking for the oldest code took me into the center of recent working systems and, figuratively at the very least, past the outer reaches of the photo voltaic system. And it revealed one thing surprising: this outdated code, removed from being revered like ELIZA’s, evokes surprisingly contradictory attitudes amongst…
software program,computing
