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| -Obits- |
| Joseph Weizenbaum, inventor of ELIZA |
| 2008-03-13 |
| Joseph Weizenbaum, a computer programmer who invented the natural language understanding program known as ELIZA and later grew skeptical of artificial intelligence, has died, his family said Thursday. He was 85. Weizenbaum was born Jan. 8, 1923, in Berlin and fled to the United States in 1936 with his family to escape persecution as Jews, according to a short 2003 biography published by Magdeburg's Leibniz-Institut fuer Neurobiologie. He began studying math at Detroit's then-Wayne University in 1941, but broke off a year later to join the U.S. Army Air Corps where he served as a meteorologist. The school is now called Wayne State University. After the war, he completed his studies and early in his career he worked on analog machines, later helping design and build a digital computer at the school, the newsletter Tech Talk from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reported Wednesday. He joined a General Electric Co. team in 1955 that designed and built the first computer system dedicated to banking operations. "Among his early technical contributions were the list processing system, SLIP, and the natural language understanding program ELIZA, which was an important development in artificial intelligence and cemented his role in the folklore of computer science research," Tech Talk said. Weizenbaum was a professor at MIT when he developed ELIZA — named for Eliza Doolittle, the heroine of "My Fair Lady" — which became his best-known contribution to computer programming. "The ELIZA program simulated a conversation between a patient and a psychotherapist by using a person's responses to shape the computer's replies," Tech Talk reported. "Weizenbaum was shocked to discover that many users were taking his program seriously and were opening their hearts to it. The experience prompted him to think philosophically about the implications of artificial intelligence and, later, to become a critic of it." |
| Posted by:Anonymoose |
| #4 "Inventor of Eliza? Please continue." |
| Posted by: DMFD 2008-03-13 22:23 |
| #3 http://www.manifestation.com/neurotoys/eliza.php3? |
| Posted by: OldSpook 2008-03-13 21:50 |
| #2 and let them talk to each other. That would be MSNBC. |
| Posted by: SteveS 2008-03-13 20:36 |
| #1 My oldest boy did an AI science fair project built around ELIZA. I also read that there was at least one instance where someone hooked up ELIZA to another program called PARRY, which simulated |
| Posted by: Mike 2008-03-13 17:46 |