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Loebner prize 1991 #1
PC Therapist III
PresentationThe first PC Therapist program was written in 1986. Joseph Weintraub, the author, had graduated with a degree in Psychology, and then immediately become a Mainframe Computer Programmer. The frustrated therapist in him spilled out into the program, and gave the PC Therapist it’s Woody Allen type humour and helpful tone.
He wrote the Therapist shortly after buying and returning the most famous Artificial Intelligence program, ELIZA. Eliza is a simple but clever program that mimics a Rogerian Therapist by turning your own words and phrases back at you. If you say “I need my Mommy”, ELIZA will say “Tell me why you need your Mommy?” However, ELIZA has no knowledgebase and nothing of its own to talk about.
Weintraub was bored with the ELIZA program after ten minutes, and infuriated that he had spent so much money on it. He was sure he could write a better talking software program. He spent several days planning the program and then got to work on the first version of The PC Therapist. Many all nighters at the keyboard soon followed.
He founded Thinking Software in September of 1986 to market the resulting program, which sold consistently at the original price of $29.95. Users were generally pleased. One typical letter said “Thanks so much for the program. I find it to be a witty and amusing companion, and much to my amazement, theraputic!”.
The program was continuously being improved, and had a knowledgbase that grew as you talked to the Therapist, absorbing most of what you typed. A year later, a version was written that included Speech Synthesis using the Creative Labs SoundBlaster, which produces very clear and understandable human speech.
The PC Therapist III is made up of seven modules written in C, Turbo Prolog and QuickBasic. The Main Module reads the input sentence, calls a Prolog Module for parsing, and based on the content of the sentence, either uses portions of it in a reply, or accesses a half-megabyte knowledgebase called KBASEK for a relevant quote or phrase. There is also a short-term memory, a module that tracks the current topic, and a grammer module. The PC Therapist learns everything that is said to it, so conversational ability is always increasing.
One of the useful features of The PC Therapist III is that your entire conversation is stored in the file REPORT.TXT. This makes the program extremely useful for writers, reporters and students. When you find you have writer’s block on a particular topic, just chat with the PC Therapist about it for an hour. Then import the resulting ASCII Text File REPORT.TXT into your favorite word processor. You can delete the Therapist’s part of the conversation, or use it if you prefer.
The PC Therapist III is the EXACT PROGRAM that won the Loebner Prize at the Boston Computer Museum on November 8th, 1991. It is a purely text based program
A few arbitrary other nominees and winners
