Showing posts with label mental patient simulation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mental patient simulation. Show all posts

Artificial Intelligence - What Is The PARRY Computer Program?




PARRY (short for paranoia) is the first computer program to imitate a mental patient, created by Stanford University psychiatrist Kenneth Colby.

PARRY is communicated with by the psychiatrist-user in simple English.

PARRY's responses are intended to mirror the cognitive (mal)functioning of a paranoid patient.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Colby experimented with mental patient chatbots, which led to the development of PARRY.

Colby sought to illustrate that cognition is fundamentally a symbol manipulation process and that computer simulations may help psychiatric research.

Many technical aspects of PARRY were shared with Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA.

Both of these applications were conversational in nature, allowing the user to submit remarks in plain English.

PARRY's underlying algorithms, like ELIZA's, examined inputted phrases for essential terms to create plausible answers.





PARRY, on the other hand, was given a history in order to imitate the right paranoid behaviors.

Parry, who was fictitious, was a gambler who had gotten into a fight with a bookie.

Parry was paranoid enough to assume that the bookie would send the Mafia after him.

Since a result, PARRY freely shared information on its crazy Mafia ideas, as it would wish to enlist the user's assistance.

PARRY was also born with the ability to be "sensitive to his parents, religion, and sex" (Colby 1975, 36).

In most other topics of conversation, the show was neutral.

If PARRY couldn't find a match in its database, it may respond with "I don't know," "Why do you ask that?" or by returning to an earlier subject (Colby 1975, 77).

Whereas ELIZA's achievements made Weizenbaum a skeptic of AI, PARRY's findings bolstered Colby's support for computer simulations in psychiatry.

Colby picked paranoia as the mental state to mimic because it has the least fluid behavior and hence is the simplest to see.

Colby felt that human cognition was a process of symbol manipulation, as did artificial intelligence pioneers Herbert Simon and Allen Newell.

PARRY's cognitive functioning resembled that of a paranoid human being as a result of this.

Colby emphasized that a psychiatrist conversing with PARRY had learnt something about human paranoia.

He saw PARRY as a tool to help novice psychiatrists get started in their careers.

PARRY's reactions might also be used to determine the most successful therapeutic discourse lines.

Colby hoped that systems like PARRY would assist confirm or refute psychiatric hypotheses while also bolstering the field's scientific credibility.

On PARRY, Colby put his shame humiliation hypothesis of paranoid insanity to the test.

In the 1970s, Colby performed a series of studies to see how effectively PARRY could simulate true paranoia.

Two of these examinations resembled the Turing Test.

To begin, practicing psychiatrists were instructed to interview patients using a teletype terminal, an antiquated electromechanical typewriter that was used to send and receive typed messages over telecommunications.

The doctors were unaware that PARRY was one of the patients who took part in the interviews.

The transcripts of these interviews were then distributed to a group of 100 psychiatrists.

These psychiatrists were tasked with determining which version was created by a computer.

Twenty psychiatrists properly recognized PARRY, whereas the other twenty did not.

A total of 100 computer scientists received transcripts.

32 of the 67 computer scientists were accurate, while 35 were incorrect.

According to Colby, the findings "are akin to tossing a coin" statistically, and PARRY was not exposed (Colby 1975, 92).



~ Jai Krishna Ponnappan

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You may also want to read more about Artificial Intelligence here.



See also: 


Chatbots and Loebner Prize; ELIZA; Expert Systems; Natural Language Processing and Speech Understanding; Turing Test.


References & Further Reading:


Cerf, Vincent. 1973. “Parry Encounters the Doctor: Conversation between a Simulated Paranoid and a Simulated Psychiatrist.” Datamation 19, no. 7 (July): 62–65.

Colby, Kenneth M. 1975. Artificial Paranoia: A Computer Simulation of Paranoid Pro￾cesses. New York: Pergamon Press.

Colby, Kenneth M., James B. Watt, and John P. Gilbert. 1966. “A Computer Method of Psychotherapy: Preliminary Communication.” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 142, no. 2 (February): 148–52.

McCorduck, Pamela. 1979. Machines Who Think: A Personal Inquiry into the History and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence, 251–56, 308–28. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company.

Warren, Jim. 1976. Artificial Paranoia: An NIMH Program Report. Rockville, MD: US. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Public Health Service, Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health Administration, National Institute of Mental Health, Division of Scientific and Public Information, Mental Health Studies and Reports Branch.






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