“Playing with numbers that was his game!
Manmohan Singh was his name!
Everything in economics he had the answer!
Om shanthi; will miss you sir…”
What is common between the first AI to ‘listen’ to your thoughts and the lady who is ‘fair’!?
What is in a name!
Well, it is the name!
read on!
The term ‘Fair’ is actually not racist; at least when it is used properly since the original meaning is that Fair lady is a term that is often used to describe a woman who is considered to be beautiful, elegant, and pleasant in appearance.
Of course the word has been misused so much to reflect the colour which is sad! We have a similar word in Hindi called the “GORI”! Many songs have used the word to actually mean a beautiful woman though it may have some deviations!
The blog of course is not to address that! The first official use of Fair lady can be seen in context with the movie My Fair lady!
The link in that and the first AI is in the name! The name is ELIZA!
So ELIZA is an early natural language processing computer program developed from in 1960s at MIT by Joseph Weizenbaum.
What is so special is that what finally happened!
Weizenbaum named his program ELIZA after Eliza Doolittle, a working-class character in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. The play of course later was made in to the very famous musical My Fair Lady.
According to Weizenbaum, ELIZA’s ability to be “incrementally improved” by various users made it similar to Eliza Doolittle, since Eliza Doolittle was taught to speak with an upper-class accent in Shaw’s play!
However, unlike the human character in Shaw’s play, ELIZA is incapable of learning new patterns of speech or new words through interaction alone. Edits must be made directly to ELIZA’s active script in order to change the manner by which the program operates!
So Weizenbaum Created ELIZA to explore communication between humans and machines, ELIZA simulated conversation by using a pattern matching and substitution methodology that gave users an illusion of understanding on the part of the program, but had no representation that could be considered really understanding what was being said by either party!
Mind you this is in the 1960s!
Whereas the ELIZA program itself was written (originally) in MAD-SLIP, the pattern matching directives that contained most of its language capability were provided in separate “scripts”, represented in a lisp-like representation.
The most famous script, DOCTOR, simulated a psychotherapist of the Rogerian school (in which the therapist often reflects back the patient’s words to the patient) and used rules, dictated in the script, to respond with non-directional questions to user inputs. It is like when you visit a Psychiatrist, many time he or she would simply urge to open up by asking things like “how do you feel?” or “what is your thoughts?” instead of directly providing an answer! This is what ELIZA was trained to do!
As such, ELIZA was one of the first chatterbots (“chatbot” modernly) and one of the first programs capable of attempting the Turing test!
ELIZA’s creator, Weizenbaum, intended the program as a method to explore communication between humans and machines.
He was surprised and shocked that some people, including Weizenbaum’s secretary, attributed human-like feelings to the computer program.
Many academics believed that the program would be able to positively influence the lives of many people, particularly those with psychological issues, and that it could aid doctors working on such patients’ treatment!
Weizenbaum first implemented ELIZA in his own SLIP list-processing language, where, depending upon the initial entries by the user, the illusion of human intelligence could appear, or be dispelled through several interchanges.
Some of ELIZA’s responses were so convincing that Weizenbaum and several others have anecdotes of users becoming emotionally attached to the program, occasionally forgetting that they were conversing with a computer!
While ELIZA was capable of engaging in discourse, it could not converse with true understanding. However, many early users were convinced of ELIZA’s intelligence and understanding, despite Weizenbaum’s insistence that it cannot be true!
Weizenbaum’s own secretary reportedly asked Weizenbaum to leave the room so that she and ELIZA could have a real conversation.
Weizenbaum was surprised by this and felt that he had not realized that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people!
Now the cherry on the cake is that; the original ELIZA source-code had been missing since its creation in the 1960s!
The source-code is of high historical interest since it demonstrates not only the specificity of programming languages and techniques at that time, but also the beginning of software layering and abstraction as a means of achieving sophisticated software programming!
Now if someone named ELIZA or something similar is chatting with you in the net, be sure to ask if she knows someone called Weizenbaum! If ‘it’ replies “Oh, that is my father!” then, well; ask for her source code!
Of course ELIZA was a vault of knowledge! In the same way a repository of economic knowledge was Shri Manmohan Singh!
A brilliant mind who will always be remembered for his financial genius!
Heart felt condolences!
He will be missed…
Om shanti…
ramadocblog 