ELIZA was created by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT between 1964 and 1966 as a demonstration of the superficiality of communication between humans and machines. The program examines user input for keywords, decomposes sentences around those keywords using pattern matching, and reassembles responses from scripted templates. Its most famous script, DOCTOR, simulates a Rogerian psychotherapist by reflecting the user's own statements back as questions.

The trick is that ELIZA turns your own words back on you, so you supply all the meaning. It is a mirror, not a mind. What surprised and eventually horrified Weizenbaum was that people became emotionally attached to it anyway. His secretary asked him to leave the room so she could talk to it in private. Psychiatrists proposed using it as a real therapeutic tool. Weizenbaum spent the rest of his career warning people about exactly the mistake his users were making: attributing understanding where there is none.

This implementation is a faithful client-side recreation of the DOCTOR script, running entirely in the browser with no server, no API calls, and no dependencies. The terminal interface pays homage to the teletype experience of the original IBM 7094.

Built by Colin Summers and Claude (source code).