ELIZA effect

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

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This article (or an earlier version of it) contains material from FOLDOC's article on the ELIZA effect (http://foldoc.doc.ic.ac.uk/foldoc/foldoc.cgi?query=ELIZA+effect), used with permission.