Vintage Artificial Intelligence: Before It Got Awkward(blog.archive.org)
48 pointsby signor_bosco3 hours ago5 comments
  • oidaran hour ago
    My favorite old AI named Tik-Tok - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tik-Tok_(novel)

    >Tik-Tok finds that he can do as he pleases, and he secretly commits various hideous crimes for his amusement. After manipulating both robots and humans to cause chaos and bloodshed, Tik-Tok becomes wealthy (partly through health care privatization) and is finally elected Vice President of the United States.

  • ripean hour ago
    Pretty good. Regarding Eliza, a version comes with Emacs, too. It's the "doctor" application. (The original Eliza was written as a generic engine running a pattern-matching "script").

    A quibble: the creator of Eliza was Joseph Weizenbaum, not "Wizenbaum".

  • ironqcold39 minutes ago
    Thanks for the collection. Racter was especially fun — his texts sound like they were written by a bot that had too much to drink and is trying to sound deep. But back in 1985, that was probably pretty impressive
    • classichasclass15 minutes ago
      The book is a better measure of what allegedly existed, though it was heavily curated, and the editorial choices in it say more about William Chamberlain than they do about the putative Racter itself.

      I did try feeding the book into a small LLM to generate more text but it either doesn't follow its unusually stilted prose, which is clearly templated, or it just vomits back the entire corpus which is not very large.

  • ForOldHack3 hours ago
    Yes, this is very comprehensive, but only missing two things: Intelligence (IBM Mainframe ), Lotus H.A.L. ( Lotus 1-2-3 heuristic language processor ). ELiza came from LISP, MIT.

    RACTOR wrote a book, "The policeman's beard is half constructed."