Automated Comedians

[wuliheron]

Alastair Clarke is an evolutionary biologist who published the first comprehensive evolutionary and cognitive theory of humor that uses fuzzy logic and simple renormalization to explain every joke theoretically possible. As far as I can tell he suggests that all of cognition revolves around humor and different emotions are all variations of laughter or humor. I'm not sure because I never finished reading the stuff which is just that dry, dry, dry academic humor that only academics seem to like. Anyway, it seems researchers have already taken the theory to heart and begun creating artificial intelligences with a sense of humor that is sometimes better than the average persons. It's been a dream of mine for years that I might be able to buy a Yoda doll or something that spouts the appropriate tongue in cheek Yogi Berra mind-numbing wisecracks like some sort of magic 8 ball on steroids and now it looks like I might get my wish!

Before Alastair published his theory IBM began working on building their first memristor neuromorphic chip. They spent like huge sums to take fMRI scans of a cat's brain and figure out how the thing is wired between different parts and neurons. They're still working on how all the different neurons work and all that, but they think they have the basic wiring down well enough to be able to use in a robot or whatever and if they do use the fuzzy logic humor theory of Alastair we could be looking at robots being the next dudes to join Dudeism or become late night comedians. I don't think they're really quite ready to give one more than the mind of a toddler or mouse or whatever, but even those should be capable of some really great jokes. Who knows, maybe they'll even design one with an abiding sense of humor.

Personally, I'm curious to see what would happen if they built a quantum neural network based on the same humorous fuzzy logic approach. When quantum mechanics was first discovered for decades a hot topic among physicists was how to design experiments to discourage practical jokers.