My First Experience with an AI

In 1977 the magazine Creative Computing published a BASIC program that was written by Jeff Shrager. It was based on a program written by Joseph Weizenbaum called “ELIZA” in the middle 1960s. The program simulated a discussion with a psychoanalyst. Although the natural language processing was rudimentary, there were times when the program gave the illusion that it had intelligence. It was most fun if you “played along”, and pretended that you actually had a problem.