This is one of my course reports at first sumbitted in April, 2023 and published here in Dec, 2023.
History
When ChatGPT has been introduced months ago, the current dynamics of chatbots advances Alan Turing (1950)’s ideal, where he proposed the question “Can machines think”. This retrospective will look back at the history of chatbots, from the early days of chatbots to the present day, highlighting the past milestones that have shaped today’s more powerful chatbots.
The first chatbot is called ELIZA (Weizenbaum, 1966) as a response to the Turing test (Shum et al., 2018). ELIZA was invented by Weizenbaum in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of MIT in 1964 (Skrebeca et al., 2021). This machine, named DOCTOR at that time, worked as a Rogerian psychotherapist to answer emotions-related questions. Because Weizenbaum only used a rule-based approach and limited patterns to generate answers in ELIZA, it is evident that these utterances deviate from humans’ words, especially from professional therapists.
PARRY is another robot in the early years created by Kenneth Colby, a Stanford psychiatrist as well as computer scientist, in 1972 (Colby, 1976). As a part of psychology research, this work assumes the role of a simulated paranoid schizophrenic patient rather than a doctor as ELIZA, equipping with effective emotion variables like anger, fear, and mistrust. Compared with ELIZA, beyond the similar pattern and rule-based approach shared by both of them, PARRY is more well-engineered with a more advanced structure (Thorat & Jadhav, 2020).
Ractor is another notable chatbot (Chamberlain, 1984). It was developed by William Chamberlain and Thomas Etter in 1983 for Amiga, Apple II, Macintosh platforms (Zemčík, 2019). The main function of Ractor is to create proses like the following one:
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