The world where machines can take action on their own, without being programmed, is artificial intelligence.
There was a time when we used to write chatbots using a set of rules similar to a rules engine. Something along the lines of, if the incoming message consists of these keywords, respond this way. But this produced monotonous results.
Eliza was one of the oldest chatbots that was invented, and ran on pattern recognition and string substitution. It was developed by Joseph Weizenbaum at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory between 1964 and 1966. More than a chatbot, Eliza was a Rogerian psychotherapist.
Chat with Eliza in real time by visiting this URL: http://www.manifestation.com/neurotoys/eliza.php3 ...