Your Computer Making Jokes! Coming Soon!

I was very fortunate to get to see the computer revolution from the inside out. As a former computer guru I built hundreds of systems from scratch and went to people's homes and offices to teach them how to use these new wonder machines they had heard so much about, but didn't have the foggiest idea how to use.


I have seen a lot of progress over the years that left me amazed, and still does on a regular basis! And the fact that they are predicting computing speed doubling every couple of years has me reserving spots in my brain to try to contain all of the amazement that's ahead!


Research and development in areas such as fuzzy logic and artificial intelligence is progressing at a whirlwind pace. Faster than anyone could have ever predicted.

Now, they are even starting to make inroads into computer humor! Anyone who has worked with computers a lot seems to have gotten to learn a little about having to deal with occasional frustrations and counting to 10 before explaining to their computer it needs to learn to be a little nicer! Teaching them to throw out a little comic relief at those times could be a Quantum leap in computer/human relations! LOL!

I started in computers by using DOS, Disk Operating System. No mouse, no pretty pictures, just type commands to the machine and it would print your answer on the screen. There were times when I would have to type 20 or 30 letters or numbers in perfect sequence before hitting enter and hoping the machine was in a good mood! Get just one thing wrong and the machine would come back with something like, What in the world are you talking about? LOL!

These machines can be so precise and exacting or they don't want to play! The more you understood what they do and how they do it, the more sense that makes. If you are reading this on a computer now then the machine's hard drive is spinning around at anything from 5,000 to 10,000 revolutions per minute or more. And in order for these words to be here in front of you, if this file is on your computer, then a read/write head had to read infinitesimally small north or south magnetic poles off of that spinning hard drive and translate them into words! This hardly seems a platform you could get jokes out of but now the adventure has begun!

At the American Association for Artificial Intelligence conference in Vancouver, Canada University of Cincinnati researchers Julia Taylor and Larry Mazlack recently announced their "bot” which is a software program — that recognizes jokes.

"This work has a relationship to 'Sociable Computing,'" says Mazlack. "Currently, computers are often difficult to communicate with, to use and to apply to solving problems that are informally stated."

Yep, just like I said above. Get one dot out of place or don't cross one T and the machines mind usually goes out into the ether!

People have been working for decades to try to make computers more able to mimic intelligence and personality. It only seems like a logical progression since we have had decades to appreciate what a marvelous job they do of crunching numbers, pulling up facts and files and splashing beautiful colors all over our screens.

It is hard to think of them in terms like a little child in diapers that we are going to have to wait to see Artificial Intelligence, fuzzy logic and humor out of, but it will definitely be a process, even with the big breakthroughs!

“The ‘robot’ is just a software program that still needs a lot of work,” says researcher Taylor. “The idea is to be able to recognize jokes that are based on phonological similarity of words.”

Data on StarTrek seems to have as his deepest longing to become more human. As a human myself I guess I could understand why I would want computers to have this as an innate desire. But when I put new machines together out of parts I never did see that part anywhere to put in! LOL! Nonetheless, I think it is human to hope this is what they want. Like the computers and robots that still are only science fiction movie subjects, at least as of this writing.

I am going to copy a couple of the jokes the computer made. Please be gentle! LOL! Remember, even if these machines can calculate the number of grains of sand on all the sea shores of the world in 2 seconds flat, they are still crawling on all fours in this area and shaking a little rattle while verbalizing, ga ga, goo, goo! LOL

Taylor got the job of “training” the computer by providing it with information relative to American English at a child's level. They developed an extensive list of knock-knock jokes that turn on people's names, particularly.

Knock, Knock

Who is there?

Wendy

Wendy who?

Wendy last time you took a bath?

Knock, Knock

Who is there?

Dismay

Dismay who?

Dismay not be a funny joke

Here you can see it even has gone past knock knock jokes:

Here's an example of one of the robot's favorite jokes: Mother to boy: “Johnny, you’ve been working in the garden a lot this summer.Boy: “I know. My teacher told me to weed a lot.”“Notice that the boy says the teacher told him to WEED. Since ‘weed’ sounds similar to 'read,' the program can find this wordplay,” Taylor says.

So, all this shows that computers are moving towards their own final frontiers. Even though we are going to have to be patient for a while as they take those small baby steps. I think it would be wise to remember, they are after all, some of the most wondrous and marvelous machines we have ever seen. So maybe we shouldn't be too surprised if they grow up so quickly it is hard to believe!

Thank you,

Dave Briggs