As I have said, artificial intelligence is not a thing. It is not a single thing. It is a whole field, with many different approaches to the idea of getting computers to help us out with more complicated things than just adding up numbers. So we'll go over a variety of the approaches that have been used over the years, as background before we get into genAI and LLMs.
ELIZA and chatbots
Over sixty years ago a computer scientist named Joseph Weizenbaum devised a system known as ELIZA. This system, or one of the popular variants of it, called doctor, was based on Rogerian psychological therapy, one of the humanistic therapies. The humanistic therapies, and particularly Rogerian, tend to get the subject under therapy to solve his or her own problems by reflecting back, to the patient, what they have said, and asking for more detail, or more clarity. That was what ELIZA did. If you said you were having problems with family members, the system would, fairly easily, pick out the fact that "family members" was an important issue, and would then tell you something like "Tell me more about these family members." Many people felt that ELIZA actually did pass the Turing test, since many patients ascribed emotions, and even caring, to the program.
A great many people who used ELIZA, including staff at The institute where Weisenbaum worked, felt that ELIZA was intelligent, and actually had a personality. Some of them considered ELIZA a friend. The fact that such a simplistic program (the version that I worked with occupied only two pages of BASIC code) was considered intelligent is probably more a damning indictment of our ability to attend to, listen to, and care for our friends, then it is proof that we are approaching true artificial intelligence.
(If you want you can find out more about ELIZA at https://web.njit.edu/~ronkowit/eliza.html )
Other chatbots have been developed, based on simple analysis and response mechanisms, and sometimes even simpler than those underlying ELIZA. Chatbots have been used in social media all the way back to the days of Usenet. Yes, Virginia, there was social media before Facebook.
Expert Systems
A field in which I was able to explore some of the specialty programming languages, and programming for the artificial intelligence systems, is expert systems. Expert systems are based on a model of, and observation of, the way that a human expert approaches a problem. It was noted, in interviewing human experts, and determining their approach to solving problems, that they would ask a series of questions, and generally those which would be answered with a yes or no response. In data management and representation terms, this seem to fit the model of a binary tree. Thus, it was felt that and expert system program could be built by determining these questions, for a given field, and the order in which they should be asked. Expert systems, therefore, owe a lot to theories of database management.
One of the observations, when building expert systems, was that, in an optimal situation, a question would only be asked once. Therefore, there were no requirements to return to a prior question, or to repeat any kind of functions or processes. Functional programming languages, the specialty type used for building expert systems, are therefore somewhat unique in programming languages, in that they have no loops or cycles or provisions for creating them. The flow chart for an expert system program is therefore a drop through type. You start at the beginning, follow the binary tree down, and come up with your answer.
Expert systems are definitely one of the success stories of artificial intelligence. They have been very effective for diagnosis and troubleshooting. Medical diagnosis, in a particular problem field, has been using expert systems for a number of years, and have found them extremely helpful. They have also being useful in troubleshooting problems for certain specialized types of equipment. In addition, programmers being programmers, examples of expert system programs exist for things like the best wine pairing for dinner.
The problem with expert systems as a candidate for artificial intelligence is that you need a separate expert system for each specialty field. Expert systems are based on the database of questions to be asked, and the links resulting from the answers. Individual expert system programs are highly field dependent, and there is significant difficulty in using an existing expert system program to develop an expert system in a different field.
AI topic and series
Introduction and ToC: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2026/01/ai-000-intro-table-of-contents.html
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