5HC : Chinese boxes or tea chests?

David Lebling · 01 Feb 2005, 14:05 · from 2005-February.txt.gz

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From: dlebling at hyraxes.com (David Lebling)
Date: Tue Feb  1 14:05:43 2005
Subject: (urth) 5HC : Chinese boxes or tea chests?
References: <20050201154712.13264.qmail at web25703.mail.ukl.yahoo.com>
	<1f7617370502011143170eb5c8 at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <006201c508aa$3167dcc0$a51b0101 at gensym.com>

From: "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes" <danldo at gmail.com>
> That would be "Eliza." It didn't really fool very many
> people or for very long.

Indeed it was Eliza, written by Joseph Weizenbaum. For a long discussion of
the reaction to the program, see his book "Computer Power and Human Reason,"
a passionate critique of "strong AI."

Eliza was widely distributed as "Doctor," which imitated a Rogerian
psychotherapist. Parry imitated (in my opinion in an even cruder way than
Eliza's effort) a paranoid schizophrenic. There is a classic dialog between
the two which is easy to Google for (try "parry" and "doctor").

It does not take long to see that either is not human, or able to understand
English in even a very crude way, but many people did not, for various
reasons, most generally from the social surround of how the program was
presented. If the source of the answers is described as a person, many
people will believe that it is in fact a person, until the evidence to the
contrary is overwhelming.

What lessons about 5HC we may draw from this experience I hesitate to guess.

-- Dave Lebling, aka vizcacha

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