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Vintage Computers Any vintage computer systems, calculators, video games etc., but with an emphasis on 1980s and earlier equipment. |
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11th Feb 2021, 2:44 am | #1 |
Octode
Join Date: Nov 2011
Location: Manchester, UK.
Posts: 1,874
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Lockdown blues & (vintage) automated therapy
In conjunction with conversations on another (very unrelated) forum, I was directed to ELIZA this evening - an automated Rogerian therapist from 1966.
https://www.masswerk.at/elizabot/eliza.html As an experiment in programming for machine interaction in plain English it's rather interesting - I expect there will be people on here who know a good bit more about the background to all this than I do. At least when this Rogerian doesn't help you sort your head out, it doesn't cost you £40+ an hour
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"The best dBs, come in 3s" - Woody Brown |
11th Feb 2021, 11:29 am | #2 |
Dekatron
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: West Cumbria (CA13), UK
Posts: 6,127
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Re: Lockdown blues & (vintage) automated therapy
ELIZA: now there's a blast from the past. I first met "her" back in the early 1970s.
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Mending is better than Ending (cf Brave New World by Aldous Huxley) |
11th Feb 2021, 12:56 pm | #3 |
Moderator
Join Date: Mar 2012
Location: Fife, Scotland, UK.
Posts: 22,866
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Re: Lockdown blues & (vintage) automated therapy
So artificial sanity predates artificial intelligence?
I've now got this image in my head of an early computer controlling a vast multi-track tape player to select between spoken phrases like "Vould you like to tell me about zat?" But the speech recognition to go with it couldn't have been done. David
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Can't afford the volcanic island yet, but the plans for my monorail and the goons' uniforms are done |
11th Feb 2021, 7:53 pm | #4 |
Octode
Join Date: Nov 2011
Location: Manchester, UK.
Posts: 1,874
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Re: Lockdown blues & (vintage) automated therapy
The replay end of that could have been done with a mellotron!
Someone I know is involved in a project to save health service money by providing automated advice to people - especially those suffering from hallucinations - over a mobile phone. I am sceptical of this approach, and I take the sufferings of these patients rather seriously. When I tried to satirise his efforts by asking whether the automated phone service would whisper in one’s ear ‘do it - do it now’ he seemed unsure how to take it
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"The best dBs, come in 3s" - Woody Brown |
16th Feb 2021, 9:30 pm | #5 |
Octode
Join Date: Apr 2018
Location: Newbury, Berkshire, UK.
Posts: 1,287
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Re: Lockdown blues & (vintage) automated therapy
I remember typing in "Eliza" from a book (I think it was "101 BASIC computer games") and amusing myself with it for a while. I even extended it a bit with new "trigger" words. Of course at the time I was a teenager so the maturity level was not high
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