Rules-Based AI

The first serious attempts at AI used rules to mimic human behaviour in conversation.

ELIZA (1964 - 1967) was an early text chatbot that pretended to be a therapist and used a set of pattern-matching rules written by its creator, Joseph Weizenbaum.

The screenshot below shows an example of a conversation with ELIZA.

In the conversation above, ELIZA is able to find a word ("tired") in the user's message and then use that word in its response ("How long have you been tired?").

At the time it was created, people were blown away by how "human-like" ELIZA sounded.

In the next activity you can interact with ELIZA yourself and see if you can guess her rules.