Eliza8

Your Pico-8 has something to say.

The power of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab (circa 1966) has been brought to the Pico-8. The software that once took on the Turing Test is now yours to command. Marvel as the illusion of a living computer breaks down within seconds!

ELIZA's creator, Joseph Weizenbaum, once wrote, "I had not realized ... that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people." Maybe you'll be powerfully deluded as well!

Features of this release:

• An interesting archaelogical look at early AI
• User-scriptable! (see blog for info)
• Reproduces precisely a famous ELIZA conversation
• Not based on the simplified BASIC version; this is the real deal!
• Adopted by Janet H. Murray (author of Hamlet on the Holodeck) as a CS learning aide in Georgia Tech (such an honor!)

How Does it Work?

At its core, Eliza8 is simply a pattern matching engine, with prebuilt responses based on keywords. Eliza8 does the following:

1. Break your sentence into its individual words and throw away everything except those words that match against its pre-defined keywords.
2. Reorder the found keywords by ranking; high to low.
3. Look into the keyword definition file and retrieve a list of sentence patterns for each keyword, starting with the highest rank.
4. The first found pattern match to the input sentence wins! One of the responses associated with the winning pattern is chosen for display.

Customizing Eliza8

One of the downloads available is a "base_script.txt" file which matches the in-built script when you boot Eliza8. This is to show you how the conversation logic is arranged and can be modified to make your own script. When Eliza8 is booted and ready to chat, drag in your own custom script to load it and enjoy.

Make a copy of this file and modify it to start understanding how to make your own script. You could write a script that specializes in a specific topic, that has a filthy mouth, or just extend the existing script to be more believable. The sky (and Pico-8 memory) is the limit!

See the blog post for more detail on the usage, organization, and purpose of the script file.

System Requirements

• A keyboard
• A plain-text editor, if you intend to write a script
• A licensed copy of Pico-8 v0.22.0 or higher if you want to examine the Pico-8 cartridge

What's With the Box Art?

Just wanted an unusual banner graphic to promote this silly toy. It imagines a "what if Pico-8 cartridges were physical items that were boxed and sold."