Main Page | See live article | Alphabetical index The ELIZA effect refers to the tendency of humans to attach associations to terms from prior experience. For example, there is nothing magic about the symbol "+" that makes it well-suited to indicate addition; it's just that people associate it with addition. Using "+" or "plus" to mean addition in a computer language is taking advantage of the ELIZA effect. The ELIZA effect is a good thing when writing a programming language. For example, the operator overloading in many object-oriented programming languages such as C++ allows new data types to use the same semantics as built-in numeric types. However, the ELIZA effect can blind one to serious shortcomings when analysing an Artificial intelligence system. Compare ad-hockery See also: AI-complete, Turing test This article (or an earlier version of it) contains material from FOLDOC's article on the ELIZA effect, used with permission. This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.