World's First Chat System Could Change Personalities: ELIZA Code Reveals New Secrets

A group of researchers has examined the source code of the ELIZA program, which was recently discovered in the archives of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Previously, ELIZA was mainly known as a 'kind female therapist' who asked users leading questions. However, the code analysis revealed that ELIZA is not just a simple chatbot with pattern matching. It is a complex platform that supports multiple 'personas' (scripts), including the famous Doctor script (simulating a psychotherapist), as well as scripts for discussing weather, math, poetry, color, paradoxes, elevators, and even France. ELIZA's architecture, separating the system and scripts, anticipated modern software patterns such as configuration as data, plugin architecture, and domain-specific languages. The researchers note that the choice of the psychotherapist role was a technical convenience: this role allowed asking general open-ended questions without requiring extensive knowledge of the real world. Other scripts formed different personalities, for example, the Neweng script for small talk about New England, where the program uses phrases like 'NICE AND COOL' and 'UP THERE.' Thus, ELIZA not only changed perceptions of human-computer interaction but also demonstrated that as early as the 1960s, developers were laying the foundations for creating chatbots with customizable personalities.