I Learned FSA, Fell in Love with ELIZA, and Ended Up with Claude

The Theory That Stuck

It's December 2001 — barely two months into our first semester at S.S.B.N P.G College, Anantapur, and my professor draws something on the board that looks deceptively simple: [State A] → input → [State B] → input → [State C]. "That," he said, "is how machines think." Finite State Automata (FSA) is one of the most elegant ideas in computer science. A system exists in one state at a time. It receives an input. It transitions to the next state. Repeat. No chaos. No ambiguity. Every move is defined. A vending machine is an FSA. A traffic light is an FSA. Your morning routine is probably an FSA (Wake → Coffee → Human). Twenty-five years later, I still think in states and transitions when I'm solving problems. Some lessons never leave you.

Then I Met ELIZA

Later that semester came ELIZA. I typed something into the terminal. It responded. I typed more. It responded again. And then — I'm not proud of this — I typed: "I love you." Fast forward to 2026: I went looking for her again. Found her on the Microsoft Store — ELIZA 1966, a faithful offline reimplementation by Szymon Jessa, based on Weizenbaum's original 1966 script. Some things are worth finding twice. Here's what actually happened:

2026. ELIZA 1966 app (Microsoft Store). She still didn't understand me. I still tried to explain myself. Some things never change. 😄

The ELIZA Effect — And a Mystery

What happened to me has a name: The ELIZA Effect — defined as the tendency to read far more understanding than is warranted into strings of symbols strung together by computers. Weizenbaum himself was shaken by it. He wrote in Computer Power and Human Reason (1976) that his own secretary — who had watched him build ELIZA for months and knew it was just code — one day asked him to leave the room so she could speak to ELIZA privately. Now here's the fascinating twist: researchers aren't even sure the secretary existed. The ELIZA Archaeology Project, which has spent years studying Weizenbaum's original archives, found multiple hand-edited versions of this story — raising the question of whether the secretary was real, a composite, or a carefully crafted narrative. So here's the delicious irony: the most famous story about humans being fooled by AI might itself be a fiction.

FSA and ELIZA — More Connected Than You Think

Here's what my professor never told me: ELIZA was basically FSA in a trench coat.

• Pattern detected: "I [verb] you" → Transition to: "Why do you [verb] me?"
• Pattern detected: "[verb] you" → Transition to: "You say [verb]"
• No real memory. No understanding. Just elegant state transitions dressed up to feel human.

And Then Came Claude

Fast forward to 2026. The difference from ELIZA is not just quantitative — it's qualitative.