ELIZA Reanimated

June 20, 2025 by Al Williams 7 Comments

The last time we checked in with the ELIZA archeology project, they had unearthed the earliest known copy of the code for the infamous computer psychiatrist written in MAD-SLIP. After a lot of work, that version is now running again, and there were a number of interesting surprises.

While chatbots are all the modern rage, [Joseph Weizenbaum] created what could be the first one, ELIZA, in the mid-1960s. Of course, it wasn’t as capable as what we have today, but it is a good example of how simple it is to ape human behavior.

The original host was an IBM 7094, and MAD-SLIP fell out of favor. Most versions known previously were in Lisp or even Basic. But once the original code was found, it wasn’t enough to simply understand it. They wanted to run it.

Continue reading “ELIZA Reanimated” →

The ELIZA Archaeology Project: Uncovering The Original ELIZA

February 22, 2024 by Maya Posch 31 Comments

Since ELIZA was created by [Joseph Weizenbaum] in the 1960s, its success had led to many variations and ports being written over the intervening decades. The goal of the ELIZA Archaeology Project by Stanford, USC, Oxford and other university teams is to explore and uncover as much of this history as possible, starting with the original 1960s code. As noted in a recent blog post by [Anthony Hay], most of the intervening ‘ELIZA’ versions seem to have been more inspired by the original rather than accurate replicas or extensions of the original. This raises the question of what the original program really looked like, a question which wasn’t answered until 2020 when the original source code was rediscovered. Continue reading “The ELIZA Archaeology Project: Uncovering The Original ELIZA” →

Hacking The Sci-Fi Contest Team Requirement

March 17, 2014 by Mike Szczys 7 Comments

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We saw that some readers were not entirely happy with the team requirement for our Sci-Fi contest, which is running right now. We figured that those who do not work well with others might commit a bit of fraud to get around the requirement. But we’re delighted that someone found a much more creative solution. Why not enlist an AI to collaborate on your project?

[Colabot] is a hacker profile over on hackaday.io which is driven by ELIZA, a computer program that achieves limited interaction through natural language. Supposedly you add [Colabot] to your project and as it questions. We asked one on the profile page and are still awaiting the response. We think this itself could be a qualifying entry for the Sci-Fi contest if someone can find the right thematic spin to put on it.

As far as contest entries go there are only seven so far. Since everyone who submits an entry gets a T-shirt, and there are 15 total prize packages, we encourage you to post your entry as soon as possible. We want to see teams from hackerspaces and we can cryptically tell you that good things come to teams who post their project with the “sci-fi-contest” tag early!

TEMPEST: A Signal Problem

January 25, 2009 by Eliot 12 Comments

TEMPEST is the covername used by the NSA and other agencies to talk about emissions from computing machinery that can divulge what the equipment is processing. We’ve covered a few projects in the past that specifically intercept EM radiation. TEMPEST for Eliza can transmit via AM using a CRT monitor, and just last Fall a group showed how to monitor USB keyboards remotely. Through the Freedom of Information Act, an interesting article from 1972 has been released. TEMPEST: A Signal Problem (PDF link dead, try Internet Archive version) covers the early history of how this phenomenon was discovered. Uncovered by Bell Labs in WWII, it affected a piece of encryption gear they were supplying to the military. The plaintext could be read over that air and also by monitoring spikes on the powerlines. Their new, heavily shielded and line filtered version of the device was rejected by the military who simply told commanders to monitor a 100 feet around their post to prevent eavesdropping. It’s an interesting read and also covers acoustic monitoring. This is just the US history of TEMPEST though, but from the anecdotes it sounds like their enemies were not just keeping pace but were also better informed.

[via Schneier]