Eliza is a modern incarnation of the ELIZA program first developed in the mid-1960's at MIT's AI lab, ported to pure Ink and compiled to JavaScript with September to also run in the browser, as well as as a command-line app.

ELIZA was one of the earliest programs designed to hold a natural language conversation with human users, and uses a simple algorithm with a predefined "script" to parse your messages and try to offer a related response. The most popular script, also included in this web app, is a "doctor" script that tries to ask rhetorical questions like a superficial therapist might.

If you want to simply try Eliza, you can try the online chat interface.

If you want to customize Eliza or run it locally:

1. Clone the repository.
2. Download an Ink release binary for your platform.
3. Run ink main.ink to start the command-line conversation repl.

You can modify the script in script.txt to change how Eliza responds to queries from the user. The format for the file is not formally specified, but should be self-explanatory.

This Ink implementation of Eliza is based on MIT-licensed open-source implementations at jezhiggins/eliza.py and wadetb/eliza, with tweaks from the original 1966 paper on ELIZA's design. Eliza references a script, kept in the repository as script.txt, to generate responses. The script follows a format that feels like a domain-specific regular expression, so other scripts may be added to Eliza to modify its behavior.

Eliza's core algorithm is implemented in isomorphic Ink code that can run both natively and in the browser, which makes Eliza the first real-world Ink application that runs on both environments with the same codebase.

On the client, the eliza.ink library is loaded by main.ink and run in a simple read-print loop.

`` ...

eliza := load('lib/eliza')
runEliza := eliza.runWithScript

readFile('script.txt', file => file :: {
	() -> log('Could not find script file')
	_ -> runEliza(
		file
		scan
		response => out(response + char(10) + '?> ')
	)
})

In the browser, eliza.ink is compiled to JavaScript with the September compiler, and called from UI code in lib/ui.js.ink that renders the rest of the application by leveraging Torus as a rendering library. Using Torus's lower level APIs, the Ink code driving the UI can describe the application UI declaratively and depend on the framework for efficient rendering.

Most of the application logic, including the core Eliza algoritm, is in lib/. Ink programs meant to run in the browser is marked by a *.js.ink extension, like the Torus-Ink API wrapper or the UI code.

The web app lives entirely in static/, where you'll also find some vendored Ink dependencies as well as a copy of the script for web distribution. Ink code is compiled to the static/ink/ folder for serving by a few Makefile scripts, which you can run if you have the September compiler installed.

test/ specifies a small suite of unit tests for Eliza's internal implementation functions, built on Ink's unit testing library suite. You can run this test suite with make check or make t.

All Ink code in the repository is licensed under the MIT open-source license included with the distribution of this repository. The Eliza script file is exempt from this and instead shared under the license provided in its original repository github.com/wadetb/eliza.