After selecting jokes the other day, I got to wondering about what makes some jokes funny and others not so. This was the top-rated joke that I retrieved:
Richard Wiseman did the research in the early 2000's to find the world's funniest joke (done by public submissions and voting on the website Laughlab). He wrote about it in his book Quirkology. On richardwiseman.wordpress.com he has a downloadable pdf of the 1001 jokes submitted to Laughlab. This is the first joke in the list, and it is a great one:
What does an agnostic, dyslexic, insomniac do? Stays up all night wondering if there is a Dog.
While Richard was busy getting people to submit jokes and evaluate what is funniest, we've got lots of people experimenting with computers generating jokes. The motivation is to create a more natural language between computers and humans. It turns out that generating jokes is a path towards sophisticated conversation. Computers are good at knock-knock jokes and Q and A jokes - so far, they can be taught to work 'inside the box' with a rules-based approach. Beyond that, there's still a lot of work to do on the path to natural conversation. You can check them out at this site with computer generated jokes HERE. You can try out the joke generator. This is their top-rated joke:
What kind of murderer has moral fiber? A cereal killer.
Along with the computer-generated jokes, an experimental site named Which Face is Real? was on the list. I don't know how it related to computer jokes, but I checked it out. It is HERE. The choice is between a real image of a person and a computer-generated image. They all look real/unreal to me. I can't tell the differences.
But then can I tell when an image is photoshopped? Remember the Grumpy Cat? She turns out to be a real cat named Tard. Are her pictures real or fake? It turns out she looks like that. Her owners have shared videos to prove her face is what it is in the pictures.
So today's pictures are colour-stretched grunge abstracts.
