Grand Text Auto

Noah, I just wanted to comment, as we start reading the second chapter, that I’m really enjoying reading your book collaboratively with many who are a part of Grand Text Auto. I’m not sure how useful I will be as an online reviewer, because the incremental upload of the book prevents me from getting the whole picture of your overall project. At best we seem to be nitpicking, as Doug Sery at MIT Press aptly predicted and as the interface and serial method of posting encourages. But I nevertheless love the experience of reading along with others who have commented and the many others who haven’t. Progressing through your book together with these others gives me the sense of being part of a reading community.

Ahh, I remember the all powerful Sysop. You mention text games, but I also accessed graphical games as well.

The main reason I never used The Source much was due to its pricing model. I knew if I used it much, I’d easily end up spending all of my allowance and grass-cutting income on online fees. Worse yet, I’d have to justify time spent online with my parents, who received the bill. Far better to frequent BBSs where I could contact other Apple users to arrange for disk exchanges.

Will Eliza’s connection to the Turing test be in the next installment?

Yeah, I’m in it for the long haul. Also, I’m really enjoying this collaborative reading process. I could see a school using a model like this to stimulate discussion about a book — maybe a future incarnation of Project Gutenberg will have something similar.

Yes, for me the BBS world is a set of fond — and, admittedly, somewhat hazy — memories. (I can’t remember if I ever played a graphical game over a BBS connection.) Glad to see it evokes some nostalgia in others as well!

For those without personal BBS memories, I hope this section still helps set the stage by establishing the idea that I am among the many who have written about Eliza who first experienced it in a computing context quite different from the predominant present ones.

But it also strikes me that, for the BBS world more specifically, it would also be good to have a reference or two. I should obviously point people to Jason Scott’s documentary. Anything else spring to mind?

> a groundbreaking system created by computer science researcher Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT in the mid-1960s

Eliza was a small program, even by the standards of the 1960s; I think the date could be pinned more precisely to its first publication.

> one of the world’s most famous demonstrations of the potential of computing

It is not clear to me that the text makes it clear that this is directly contrary to the intent of the program.

> HAL 9000

“Years before” might be “two years” (Eliza published in 1966, Kubrick’s film debuted in 1968 and so was filmed about the same time). But conversations with computers have a much longer history, of course; Heinlein’s MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS is 1966, Star Trek has a computer testifying at a trial in 1967.

Noah, you might take a look at the pages on the RAMAC in Mechanisms–no NLP there at all, just brute force information retrieval, but the effect on people was still one of interacting with a computational persona.

[...] Grand Text Auto » EP 2.1: Meeting Eliza When I was a teenager — in the 1980s — my mother bought a personal computer. It was an impressive machine for the day, decked out with two floppy drives, a dot matrix printer, a Hayes modem, and a monochrome amber display. At first I only used the mac (tags: grandtextauto.org 2008 mes1 dia1 at_tecp Eliza artificial_intelligence blog_post) [...]

Noah, I wonder if you’re familiar with these (much less successful, but still interesting) Eliza-based AI sessions testing the ability of a bot to have cybersex.
http://virt.vgmix.com/jenny18/logs/

Interesting stuff!

Sorry to nit-pick, when I’m thoroughly enjoying the book as a whole. However:

“First unveiled years before HAL 9000’s screen debut in 2001: A Space Odyssey, it seemed that Eliza made it possible to have a real conversation with a computer.”

As I understand it, Eliza was first unveiled in 1966, with 2001 having its first screening in 1968, so the use of “years before” here is a bit disingenuous.

Actually, this may be a more interesting connection, given the close proximity of the two. Clarke and Kubrick employed Marvin Minsky as an advisor on the set of 2001, and it seems quite likely (though I haven’t checked) that Minsky could have heard about Wiezenbaum’s creation, such that it informed the treatment of Hal in the film. Hal seems to have quite a modulated, dispassionate voice, not unlike a psychotherapist. And (if I remember rightly) during the scenes as Bowman prepares to “lobotomise” Hal, the computer reverts to asking questions, akin to the Eliza technique of interrogation to conceal its lack of actual intelligence.

I’ve just started working on 2001 and Hal, so if I come across anything more concrete I will be happy to pass it on.

Ishmael, yes, the fact that it’s only two years before is also something that Mark Bernstein thought worth mentioning. I’ve changed it in the final text.

I think you’re right that there may be an interesting connection between Eliza and HAL. Have you done any more work on this? Also, any thoughts on Michael’s related chapter (“Reading Hal: Representation and Artificial Intelligence”)?

Noah,
Thanks for your reply to my earlier comment, and glad the text stands corrected.

I *have* been doing more work on HAL and Eliza, but have been a little frustrated. Having looked through most of Kubrick’s and Clarke’s recollections of the filming, I have found no explicit mention of Eliza. On the other hand, the fact that Marvin Minsky was an advisor on the set makes it not unlikely that he mentioned Weizenbaum’s report in the ACM to some one on the set.

Even if I could not find that vital historical fingerprint, however, I do think there is a more ephemeral linkage that can be drawn. In Clarke’s novelised version, he says that Hal is modelled on the human brain (following Minsky’s work) but that the interconnections are so numerous no one has any idea how the machine produces consciousness. In my argument, therefore, Hal stands as a critique of the behaviourist model of AI – this is, of course, precisely what the Turing test is all about (and also, as Michael’s article points out, chess playing computers), and it was Eliza’s ability to dupe human interlocutors that hammered home the limitations of this epistemological approach (likewise chess computers which became more powerful but therefore less like heuristic human players).

So even if Eliza is not the specific inspiration for Hal, my understanding is that Eliza is simply the most prominent manifestation of that period’s move away from Turing’s benchmark – to model the machine intelligence on the human – towards self-emergent intelligences and the honing of specialised processing systems rather than general problem solvers. I’ve got a fairly polished thesis chapter on 2001, and though it takes a slightly different tack to Hal than you are probably concerned with, I’d be happy to pass it along if you’d like.

Best,
Ishmael