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Simulation

Eliza

19666.2/ 10 · 21 votesM6

Trailer

Screenshots (8)

Artwork (3)

About

Eliza was the first chatterbot to make a splash in popular culture, originally written and conceived by Dr. Joseph Weizenbaum of MIT in 1966 to mockingly ape the style of a person-centered (Rogerian) psychotherapist or counselor, largely by prompting the user to elaborate on topics sampled from previous user input. A typical session would take the form of a typed dialogue (sometimes with simulated typing errors to further the suspension of disbelief), with the computer asking the user a series of questions and being fed responses from which to generate further questions.

The game stimulated early consideration of computer artificial intelligence (or the appearance thereof), not infrequently passing the Turing test and fooling users into believing (for a little while, at least) that they were interacting with a real human being on the other end... blazing a trail subsequently followed down by Perry the Paranoid and Racter. Additionally, the nods its conversational interface made toward natural language processing (or, again, the appearance thereof) are considered to have been influential on the early mainframe development of the interface for text adventure games such as Adventure and Zork.

Considered as a game, it is nearly the polar opposite to Emily Short's Galatea -- instead of the player probing the computer with questions, the computer probes the player with them. Many different stories will still be revealed, but in this case, that's because it'll be people tricked by the program into telling them.

Ways to play

Modes

Single player

Perspective

First person

Languages (10)

Languageaudiosubtitlesinterface
Chinese (Simplified)
English
French
German
Hungarian
Italian
Japanese
Portuguese (Portugal)
Russian
Spanish (Spain)

Game details

Business Model

Freeware / Free-to-play / Public Domain

Media Type

Download

Text Modes Supported

80×25

Input Devices Supported/Optional

Keyboard

Multiplayer Options

Modem

Number of Offline Players

1 Player

Also known as

DoctorGnu Emacs title

Dr. Apple: ElizaApple II release

Dr. SbaitsoCreative Labs' talkie version

ECC-ElizaEden Cohen's version

Eliza: The Amazing Artificial IntelligenceTag-lined title

Frankalternate title

Fredalternate title

MacElizaMac title

MelizaSNOBOL version

MyElizaAmiga title

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Facts

Developer

Zachtronics

Released

1966

Platforms

PCDOSAmigaCommodore 64Apple IITRS-80Commodore PET/CBMBrowserMainframeCP/MHeath/Zenith H8/H89

Age ratings

PEGI16ESRBM

Standing

Top 22% by 24hr peak players

Tags

Text-based / SpreadsheetMeditative / ZenInteractive fiction / text adventureText parser