[masswerk]

I guess, some of these may have been artefacts from how the printout was produced. Notably, ELIZA was an extensible system, meant to start with a small script, to be extended progressively, and featured "live" editing capabilities. According to the 1966 paper, "START" is actually ELIZA's answer after returning from an editing session. And I wouldn't be shocked, if the final empty list had been placed there for convenience by the system.

Other: It has been a while, since I had a closer look at ELIZA, and I have to admit that I forgot most about the intrinsics of the MEMORY rule.

PS: An interesting feature of ELIZA in the context of problem solving may be that, if there is more than a single recomposition rule, ELIZA will cycle through them (e.g., alternating between two expressions.) This may allow for some interesting, even surprising, and still state-dependent behavior, kind of a "Moiré logic". :-)

[anthay]

I agree with you. I think the presence of START is accidental and is not supposed to be part of the script. The ELIZA code uses a Slip function called LISTRD to read the script rules one by one. If it reads an empty list it stops reading the script and begins the conversation. So I think the empty list at the end of the script had a reason to be there. Another accidental thing about the script in the CACM paper is that there are 6 duplicated lines, each one 34 lines from the previous one. I had not heard of Moiré logic. I'm contributing to a book about ELIZA and its legacy. No publisher yet. The editors may be looking for other contributors. I realize this is not much to go on, but say if it might be of interest to you.

[masswerk]

Oh thanks, but I don't think that I have much to contribute. I had been musing about a faithful ElIZA emulation a few years ago, but ELIZAGEN put somewhat an end to this.

"Moiré logic" was a joke, meaning, an interference pattern caused by two layers of logical state.

Well, there's actually one thing, I can contribute: The famous photo of Weizenbaum on a terminal (sometimes attributed to the German magazine "Die Zeit") – e.g. here [1] – seems to show Weizenbaum on a Lorenz teletypewriter [2], so there is some probability to the photo actually having been taken in Germany.

[1] https://maeda.pm/2019/02/11/joseph-weizenbaum-humanist-techn...

[2] https://twitter.com/RetroWizzard/status/1419658098210451459 (1st image)

PS: You may find this one (my own doing) amusing: https://masswerk.at/eliza/

[anthay]

Thank you for the links. Lovely online ELIZA. I appreciate you responding.