One day, people will look back at what we call Artificial Intelligence and laugh. We do the same thing today, as chat bots totally outstrip what the computer industry called AI up until pretty recently. This didn’t escape curators at the Internet Archive, apparently, and [Jason Scott] tells us about a recent collection, “Vintage Artificial Intelligence.”
These are old software titles that will run for you in emulated machines right in your browser, ranging from somewhere in the 1970s to the 1990s. There’s Eliza, of course. Actually, there are several copies of Eliza. Given how simple it was to write Eliza, it did a pretty good job. Then there are adventure games that are pretty conversational, Lisp, Prolog, which was going to spawn expert systems to replace us all, and Racter, which tried to write fiction.
There was even Alter Ego that was supposed to help you explore life decisions, maybe? There are a couple different versions of even a few versions of Conway’s Game of Life. We aren’t sure that’s ever really been AI, but perhaps it depends on your definition. We’re happy to see Sargon, the chess program, represented.
We didn’t see Hexapawn, which is a shame. We also didn’t see Parry (the paranoid counterpart to Eliza) or that elusive software we remember but can never find that built word chains from text called George.
We’ve written about Eliza before. If you want to experiment with Prolog and you like Pokémon, you’ll appreciate this tutorial.
I still credit Eliza with my (valid) distrust of AI as a useful general purpose response tool.
George is tickling a memory, maybe I used it once upon a time.
It also holds that humans need to provide ‘AI’ with the information it is dispensing. Until the generative intelligence can learn something in the same way as humans it will have a difficult time understanding what humans want. Humans have a model of the world in their head, one where people for example have 5 fingers usually, and base their responses off a (mostly) accurate worldview. Since the AI has no worldview or imagination in the classical sense I remain distrustful of the answers.
Another thing is humans have a motivation to provide correct information to preserve their reputation at the very least, if not a desire to be helpful (not just fed a script of helpful sounding words.)