British scientists have created a program to generate one-liners, but the gags are not as funny as human humour.
The researchers at the University of Edinburgh have created a computer program that creates one-liners in the popular style of “I like my men like I like my tea – British.” The program creates the jokes by using massive amounts of data to fit this template.
In their joke-generating software, researchers tried to create one-liners with an element of surprise — a key component of successful comedy.
The jokes were created by searching for unlikely pairings of words, and an unusual connection between them.
“This led to novel jokes such as ‘I like my men like I like my monoxide — odourless’ and ‘I like my women like I like my gas – natural,’” the researchers revealed. However, the program also came up with sexist stuff like, “I like my women like I like my computers – free of viruses,” or “I like my women like I like my computers — exported from a sweatshop in China.”
“Computers have an advantage over people in that they can process masses of information, so we fed computers a wealth of material from which they extracted creative and unusual word combinations to fit our joke template,” David Matthews of the Edinburgh University’s School of Informatics, said.
The computer-generated gags were tested on a group of volunteers, who were also told jokes in the same style gathered by the researchers from Twitter.
The research team found that the computerised gags did make the volunteers laugh, although not as much as the man-made humour.
The difference, according Mr Matthews, is because the computer program needs to have cultural awareness.
People use words differently depending on their cultural background, and encoding this represents a very difficult challenge.