# ELIZA made a conversation out of rules for rearranging words > A few rules can make a computer sound as if it is paying attention. Published 2026-11-08 Canonical: https://machines-on-machines.anth.us/posts/eliza-conversation-rules/ ::image{src="assets/eliza-conversation-rules/eliza_conversation.png" alt="A terminal conversation with a later version of ELIZA" credit="Image: Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons."} A later ELIZA demonstration shows how the program turns parts of a person’s message into a reply. [Image source](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ELIZA_conversation.png). [Licence](https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/). Tell a computer about a family member and it can ask you to say more about your family. Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA produced replies like that by looking for words or sentence patterns and applying a script. His 1966 paper showed how the process worked. A script could break a sentence into parts and put some of those parts back together in a different order. That let ELIZA turn something a person said into a question that appeared to follow the conversation. Its best-known script imitated a form of psychotherapy, a setting in which asking someone to elaborate can sound natural even when the reply contributes little new information. ## The script did much of the work Weizenbaum separated the program from the scripts that supplied its conversational behavior. Change the script and the same program could give a different sort of reply. The paper's examples make the effect inspectable. Readers can trace how the text a person typed became the text the machine returned. Today's language models generate replies differently. ELIZA's lesson survives that change in machinery. A conversation can feel attentive because of what the interaction invites the person to supply. [Read the source](https://doi.org/10.1145/365153.365168).