Hogfather

39

The conversation between the Bursar and Hex is reminiscent of the Eliza program.

Eliza is a program written in the dark ages of computer science by Joseph Weizenbaum to simulate an indirect psychiatrist. It works by transforming whatever the human says into a question using a few very simple rules. To his grave concern, Weizenbaum discovered that people took his simple program for real and demanded to be left alone while ‘conversing’ with it.