Written Assignment 2: Spatial Analysis - Due Friday, October 7th

When Eliza was written, users interacted with computers through terminals connected to central servers. Consoles and TTYs were text-based interfaces akin to DOS or UNIX shells. Users ran commands and programs remotely, but gained the benefit of large-scale network connectivity on a university campus or research facility.

Today, it’s hard to imagine fully what it would have been like to interact with Eliza in her native form; part of her credibility came from the computing environment in which she was run, which used text-based commands. Arguably, any Eliza chatterbot character we create today suffers from a lack of this context.

The medium that most closely resembles Eliza’s console today is probably Instant Messenger (IM). In fact, numerous IM “bots” abound, offering automated responses to movie times or weather reports. What constraints and affordances does the medium of IM impose? If you were designing a bot (either a chatterbot like Eliza or a more utilitarian tool) for IM, what specific design issues would arise that are unique to that platform? How would you accommodate and take advantage of these constraints in your design?

Spend some time playing with Eliza (included in the NMR CD.) Discover some of its faults, but also try to glean some nice interactions from it. What are the elements of creating these? How would you modify Eliza?