How did the ELIZA program simulate human conversation in the 1960s?

Created from Britannica articles using AI. AI can make mistakes, so verify using Britannica articles.

history of artificial intelligence (AI) British mathematician Alan Turing, c. 1930s. Turing did the earliest work on AI, and he introduced many of the central concepts of AI in a report entitled “Intelligent Machinery” (1948).

In the 1960s, the ELIZA program simulated human conversation by employing simple programming tricks and canned sentences. Created by Joseph Weizenbaum, ELIZA mimicked a Rogerian psychotherapist. It used a pattern-recognition algorithm to compare user input against a set of rules, generating pre-programmed responses. This approach allowed ELIZA to maintain the illusion of understanding by rephrasing user statements as questions, a technique that made users feel heard. However, ELIZA's abilities were limited and could not pass the Turing test.123