By the mid-1960s a number of researchers emboldened by the increasing power and availability of general-purpose computers, and inspired by the dream of human-level artificial intelligence, were designing systems aimed at genuine language understanding and dialogue. The techniques and theoretical underpinnings employed varied greatly. An example of a program minimally dependent on linguistic or cognitive theory was Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA program, intended to emulate (or perhaps caricature) a Rogerian psychiatrist. ELIZA relied on matching user inputs to stored patterns (brief word sequences interspersed with numbered slots, to be filled from the input), and returned one of a set of output templates associated with the matched input pattern, instantiated with material from the input. While ELIZA and its modern chatbot descendants are often said to rely on mere trickery, it can be argued that human verbal behavior is to some degree reflexive in the manner of ELIZA, i.e., we function in “preprogrammed” or formulaic manner in certain situations, for example, in exchanging greetings, or in responding at a noisy party to comments whose contents, apart from an occasional word, eluded us.