"ELIZA is a program which makes natural language conversation with a computer possible. Its name was chosen to emphasize that it may be incrementally improved by its users, since its language abilities may be continually improved by a "teacher". Like the Eliza of Pygmalion fame, it can be made to appear even more civilized, the relation of appearance to reality, however, remaining in the domain of the playwright.
[...] With ELIZA as the basic vehicle, experiments may be set up in which the subjects find it credible to believe that the responses which appear on his typewriter are generated by a human sitting at a similar instrument in another room. How must the script be written in order to maintain the credibility of this idea over a long period of time?"