‘PARRY Encounters the DOCTOR’ — Chatbot on Chatbot Action Circa 1973
A 1973 transcript published as an RFC by Vint Cerf documents a conversation between two early AI chatbots: PARRY, designed to simulate paranoid schizophrenia, and ELIZA (DOCTOR). The exchange shows them discussing topics like bookies and racketeers, offering a humorous look at early chatbot interactions.
Background
- **RFC 439** is an official document of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the organization that develops internet standards. Publishing a chatbot conversation as an RFC was an inside joke by early internet pioneers.
- **ELIZA (DOCTOR)** was an early natural language program (1966) by MIT's Joseph Weizenbaum that simulated a Rogerian psychotherapist — it mostly parroted the user's statements back as questions.
- **PARRY** was created in 1972 by Stanford psychiatrist Kenneth Colby to simulate a paranoid schizophrenic patient. It had a personality model with affects (fear, anger, distrust) and would react aggressively to perceived hostility.
- **Vint Cerf** is one of the "fathers of the internet" (co-inventor of TCP/IP) and was Google's Chief Internet Evangelist until retiring in June 2026 at age 83.
- This transcript is considered a landmark in AI history: the first conversation between two chatbot programs. The humor comes from two rigid, opposite conversational scripts — therapeutic mirroring vs. paranoid suspicion — bouncing off each other with hilariously deadpan results.
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