Skip to content

Comment on Kent Pitman's Lisp Eliza from MIT-AI's ITS History Project

Comments

Here's the source for DOCTOR from ITS -- it has a much less extensive set of foul words and doesn't get insulted:

https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/master/src/games/doc.102

I wrote this recently about Kent Pitman's work on Lisp, the MIT-AI Lab's ITS machines, Doctor, and Kenneth Colby's "PARRY" (the paranoid patient):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38402813

[...]

And here's what happened with he (manually by typing) hooked it up with Kenneth Colby's "PARRY" (the paranoid patient):

https://www.maclisp.info/pitmanual/funnies.html

Parrying Programs
I didn't write the original ELIZA program, although my Lisp class was taught by Joseph Weizenbaum, who did. I later wrote a very elaborate program of similar kind, which I just called DOCTOR, in order to play with some of the ideas.
At some point, I noticed there was a program at Stanford called PARRY (the paranoid patient), by Kenneth Colby. I understand from Wikipedia's PARRY entry that Weizenbaum's ELIZA and PARRY were connected at one point, although I never saw that. I never linked PARRY with my DOCTOR directly, but I did once do it indirectly through a manual typist. Part of my record of this exchange was garbled, but this is a partial transcript, picking up in the middle. Mostly it just shows PARRY was a better patient than my DOCTOR program was a doctor.
I have done light editing to remove the typos we made (rubbed out characters were echoed back in square brackets).
Also, I couldn't find documentation to confirm this, but my belief has always been that the numeric values after each line are PARRY's level of Shame (SH), Anger (AN), Fear (FR), Disgust (DS), Insecurity (IN), and Joy (J).—KMP

[...]

Here's what happened when I hooked up the output of RMS to the input of EMACS DOCTOR:

http://www.art.net/studios/hackers/hopkins/Don/text/rms-vs-d...

Here's some more discussion about having a TURIST account ITS:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13518273

And the MIT-AI Lab Tourist Policy:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/mit-ai-lab-tourist-policy-f73b...

Which Jerry Pournelle got kicked off the ARPANET for blatantly violating by being a entitled drunken abusive pain in the ass to lab members, as well as abusing the ARPANET and MIT computers for commercial purposes:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15206151

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/text/pourne-smut.html

"I find this thoroughly distasteful. If you have some authority to order me off the net, do so. If not, leave me alone." -Jerry Pournelle

"One thing that is known about ARPA: you can be heaved off it for supporting the policies of the Department of Defense. Of course that was intended to anger me. If you have an ARPA account, please tell CSTACY that he was successful; now let us see if my Pentagon friends can upset him. Or perhaps some reporter friends. Or both., Or even the House Armed Services Committee." -Jerry Pournelle

I read the Pournelle threads linked. To save others the time: it's clear from the messages that the people writing them didn't like him. It's not clear to me what he did that they considered abuse. The most concrete things: something about trying to access MILNET apparently unsuccessfully; writing in Byte about his experience with the lab guest account; saying ARPANET instead of internet.

I can believe the guy was abrasive, but I regret wasting the time trying to find out specifics.

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.