Re: Remember Eliza?

[Ralph Gonzalez <rgonzale@ibl.bm>]

Bob & Cecelia wrote:

> Just got back from visiting Ernie where I got a big pile of old
> printouts. Among them, I found a few pages from an ELIZA.LOG file. For
> those who have forgotten, Eliza was a program that was supposed to
> provide the services of a therapist. You would tell Eliza your
> problems, and the program would advise you. In reality, all it did was
> look for certain keywords and spit back canned responses.

There's Eliza for Perl (which runs on all platforms).
You can edit the (text) perl code to add new phrases
(though the data format is a bit confusing!). I did this
to improve its handling of obscenities and insults.
For example, if you tell Eliza "You are a ...", she 
answers, "I know you are but what am I?". If you say
"Shove it up your ...", she says, "Would you help me
shove it up my ...?".

See The Perl Journal Issue #9, Spring 1998. The download
is the chatbot module at 

ftp://ftp.digital.com/pub/plan/perl/CPAN//modules/by-module/

There's also web-based and Java versions of Eliza available,
according to the article.
-- 
Ralph Gonzalez
rgonzale@ibl.bm