By Kristina Killgrove
 published January 17, 2025

Researchers discovered long-lost computer code and used it to resurrect the early chatbot ELIZA.

Scientists have just resurrected “ELIZA,” the world’s first chatbot, from long-lost computer code — and it still works extremely well.

Using dusty printouts from MIT archives, these “software archaeologists” discovered defunct code that had been lost for 60 years and brought it back to life.

ELIZA was developed in the 1960s by MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum and named for Eliza Doolittle, the protagonist of the play “Pygmalion,” who was taught how to speak like an aristocratic British woman.

As a language model that the user could interact with, ELIZA had a significant impact on today’s artificial intelligence (AI), the researchers wrote in a paper posted to the preprint database arXiv Sunday (Jan. 12). The “DOCTOR” script written for ELIZA was programmed to respond to questions as a psychotherapist would. For example, ELIZA would say, “Please tell me your problem.” If the user input “Men are all alike,” the program would respond, “In what way.”

Weizenbaum wrote ELIZA in a now-defunct programming language he invented, called Michigan Algorithm Decoder Symmetric List Processor (MAD-SLIP), but it was almost immediately copied into the language Lisp. With the advent of the early internet, the Lisp version of ELIZA went viral, and the original version became obsolete. Read More At Live Science.