Discussion and summary of Dr. ir. Thomas Winters' presentation, "Teaching computers humor is no laughing matter".

The Mechanics of AI and the Challenge of Comedy

To understand why AI struggles with humor, we first have to understand how large language models (like GPT) work. These models operate autoregressively, meaning they write sequentially from left to right. They function essentially like a smartphone's autocomplete feature on steroids, calculating the probability of the next word based on the previous tokens.

However, the structure of a good joke inherently conflicts with this left-to-right generation. According to the "Incongruity-Resolution Theory," a joke consists of a setup and a punchline. The setup creates an obvious interpretation, but the punchline suddenly reveals a hidden interpretation, breaking the audience's expectation. Conceptually, a comedian needs to know the punchline first to reverse-engineer a proper setup. Because an AI starts talking without knowing which punchline it is building towards, its jokes often fall flat.

Prompt Engineering: Teaching AI to be Funny

Just as AI can struggle with basic math logic unless told to "think step by step," it needs structural guidance to write comedy. The presentation demonstrates how providing the AI with "draft paper" significantly improves its comedic output.

To generate a good joke about a company called "InThePocket," the AI was instructed to:

• First brainstorm associations with the company.

• List several funny links and write punchlines for them.

• Write setups for each punchline.

• Show its reasoning steps, using a provided example about a vacuum cleaner "collecting dust".

By breaking down the process, the AI analyzed concepts like "digital transformation" and "autonomous teams". It reasoned that transformation is like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, which led to a surprisingly clever punchline: "Some companies say they're going through digital transformation, but it feels more like they're trying to turn into a butterfly and ending up as a moth".

Are Computers as Funny as Comedians?

To test the efficacy of AI humor, an improv battle was conducted in front of an unaware audience.

• Half of the jokes were read from an AI screen.

• The other half were improvised by human comedians.

• The audience rated the jokes, and the results showed that the AI and human comedians were basically equal.

• The AI even edged out the humans slightly for the "best joke of the night," capturing 35% of the vote compared to the comedians' 30%.

The Serious Need for Computational Humor

Does AI truly need a sense of humor?. The presentation concludes with a striking example of why understanding comedy is a critical safety and accuracy feature for AI.

When asked how to keep cheese from sliding off a pizza, Google's AI recommended mixing about 1/8 cup of non-toxic Elmer's school glue into the sauce. The AI scraped this information from a 12-year-old Reddit comment where a user sarcastically suggested the glue for "extra tackiness". Because the AI completely failed to recognize the joke, it presented a sarcastic internet comment as factual culinary advice.

Summary

• The Baseline: Early models struggled with humor, though specialized models like RobBERT (2020) achieved around 90% accuracy in detecting Dutch humor, compared to previous models' ~50%.

• The Structural Flaw: Standard AI models write left-to-right, predicting the next word. This ruins comedy, which requires knowing the punchline in advance to build an incongruous setup.

• The Solution: Forcing the AI to use "draft paper" to brainstorm associations, plan punchlines, and explain its reasoning drastically improves its joke-writing abilities.

• The Performance: In blind tests, AI-generated jokes performed equally to, and sometimes slightly better than, human comedians in an improv setting.

• The Necessity: Teaching computers to understand humor isn't just for entertainment; it is vital to prevent AI from misinterpreting human sarcasm as dangerous factual advice (e.g., the pizza glue incident).

Bayesian Sociology
Bayesians are the only people who can feel marginalized after being integrated.
Considering the evidence a posteriori, my belief is that I should have conjugated this sentence with the conditional tense, in order to multiply the prior approval of the reader.

Animation vs Math

Animation vs Geometry

Animation vs Physics

Animation cs Coding

The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements so surprising that they make people LAUGH, then THINK. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative — and spur people’s interest in science, medicine, and technology.

The Evolutionary Computation 'Bestiary' is a highly critical and satirical catalog of metaphor-based meta-heuristic search algorithms, intended to document the "exuberance" and proliferation of methods inspired by a vast, eclectic range of natural, supernatural, human, and physical phenomena, including classics like Genetic Algorithms and Ant Colony Optimization alongside numerous examples such as African Buffalo Optimization, Al-Biruni Earth Radius, Black Widow Optimization, COVID-19 variations, Honey Badger Algorithm, Hippopotamus Optimization, and Zombie Survival Optimization. Maintained by Claus Aranha and Felipe Campelo, the resource explicitly disavows the quality of most listed methods, labeling them as "ridiculous" and largely a "useless waste of space," functioning as "The island of Doctor Moreau" to highlight a phase in the field's history over-reliant on metaphor rather than mathematics. The document strongly recommends reading several critical papers that expose the lack of rigor and novelty in many of these metaphor-driven techniques, while algorithms are included based on peer-review publication and naming the metaphor in the title or abstract, listing only the earliest known mention.

Scientists use fonts every day to express their research through the written
word. But what if the font itself communicated (the spirit of) the research?

Show HN: A singing synthesizer for the browser with automatic 3-part harmony -