Richard Wallace (scientist)

"I was working at a startup in New York City called Vision Applications, Inc. We were entirely funded by a Department of Defense contract to produce a miniature active vision system. My specialty at the time was computer vision and robotics."

"Our thoughts were far away from natural language processing. We were, however, deeply concerned with issues of cost and robot design."

"Like many of our colleagues at the time we espoused a "minimalist" design philosophy based on cheap sensors and simple stimulus-response algorithms, rather than complex and costly processing."

"These thoughts remained dormant through the first half of the 1990s, when I struggled to establish myself as a robotics and computer vision professor at NYU and Lehigh Universities. In a very real sense A.L.I.C.E. was born from the frustration of those experiences, and the realization that much of my own job as a professor was "robotic" responses to frequently asked questions."

"The concept of deception is layered like an onion. We can peel off one level and write programs like ELIZA that fool some of the people some of the time, and then peel off another layer and write a program like A.L.I.C.E. that (apparently) fools more of the people more of the time. The evidence suggests that we should take a serious look at the role of deception in AI."

"No other theory of natural language processing can better explain or reproduce the results within our territory. You don't need a complex theory of learning, neural nets, or cognitive models to explain how to chat within the limits of A.L.I.C.E.'s 25,000 categories. Our stimulus-response model is as good a theory as any other for these cases, and certainly the simplest."