back to article Roses are #f00, violets are #00f. This witty code is a boffinry breakthrough

What do you call a computer program that uses big data to write jokes? Basic, judging by the list of groan-worthy gags generated by this new wisecracking software. Eggheads at the University of Edinburgh have developed code dedicated to spitting out quips along the lines of: "I like my men like I like my monoxide - odourless" …

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  1. Danny 4
    Coat

    Programmer Joke

    How many functional programmers does it take to change a light bulb?

    One. But they have to build an entire identical house with a new bulb in place of the old one.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I like my women how I like my bread. Ginger.

  3. Frumious Bandersnatch

    Wenn ist das Nunstück git und Slotermeyer?

    Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!

    1. graeme leggett Silver badge

      Re: Wenn ist das Nunstück git und Slotermeyer?

      "There's plenty more where that came from"

      ( output from RCI - Random Catchphrase Inserter)

    2. Don Jefe
      Terminator

      Re: Wenn ist das Nunstück git und Slotermeyer?

      I am Funnybot:

      http://m.splol.com/videos/video.rbml?mgid=mgid:cms:item:comedycentral.com:387606&weburl=http%3a%2f%2fwww.southparkstudios.com%2fclips%2f387606%2fi-am-funnybot%2f&alt=http%3a%2f%2fm.splol.com%2fvideos%2findex.rbml&cid=300

    3. TheRealRoland
      Pint

      Re: Wenn ist das Nunstück git und Slotermeyer?

      Thanks for that...

      Now i will have to work for the rest of the day, aided by the sound of sombre music, played on gramophone records, and also by the chanting of laments by my coworkers.

      ...

      Oh, they were talking about change requests?

  4. Homer 1
    Linux

    I demand royalties!

    They should try my, erm, buzzword bingo generator.

  5. sjsmoto

    Take my wifi -- please.

  6. Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

    Alien...

    Mother : Ship will self destruct in T minus 10 seconds...

    9

    8

    7

    6

    5

    4

    3

    2

    1...

    Ha ha - only kidding. And by the way, that big black acid spitting thing with the tail that I said was harmless, well, that was a just my little joke as well...

  7. Harry Kiri

    Taking Picard to warp speed

    Many decades ago we used a speech recognition grammar engine to produce euphemisms for, well, buffing the dolphin etc. <verb> the <noun> provided minutes of mirth.

    The only one that didnt fit the grammar was 'Taking Picard to Warp Speed.'.

    Semantic outliers, dontcha hate em?

  8. Sandpit
    Holmes

    No wonder they are not funny

    The idea of computers coming up with jokes isn;t hte problem as to why they are not funny, it's those programming the algorithms. Judging by how they came up with LOL and ROFL there is no suprise that the quality of the jokes generated by their software was of the same standard

    1. Irongut

      Re: No wonder they are not funny

      Well they are from Edinburgh, you can't really expect them to be funny.

      1. Steven Roper
        Devil

        Re: From Edinburgh

        Are these guys still at it? At least the've moved on from poems to jokes over the last 30 years.

        I clearly remember when this same university, way back in the early 80s, produced a "sonnets" program designed to compose poetry via contextual AI rather than just randomly stringing words together (like the poems program did on my VIC-20). Although I recall that it failed rather spectacularly, I remember this event because of one rather sinister sonnet the Edinburgh program churned out at the time, that has stuck with me ever since:

        For now the time draws near, that you shall fall

        And so it is within my depths conceal'd,

        This store keeps yet the greatest truth of all,

        And to men shall it never be reveal'd.

        So consider, take heed of what I say,

        This day you rule, tomorrow I hold sway.

        Knowing this was written by a computer spooked me back then, and looking back on it now it seems that our friends at Edinburgh presaged the RotM by a few decades!

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: No wonder they are not funny

      Granted I'm more appreciative than average, but I rather lighted the LOL and ROFL gags. They brought a smirk to my face, a much needed occurrence today.

      It's true. I like my puns like I like my wife....moaning.

      (Anon because that joke is liable to get me beat otherwise.)

    3. Naughtyhorse

      Re: No wonder they are not funny

      I thought that was pretty mediagenic language!

      <ctrl>P

      not as good as the 'barn' tho :-D

  9. The Axe
    Happy

    Feedback

    Well jokes only work when a human laughs. So they should feed all these computer generated jokes to lots of humans (crowd sourcing) and people should indicate if they laughed. Those that got lots of laughs should be feed back into the system to train it to produce better ones. It won't take many iterations before it's beating (insert your opinion of the crappiest comedian here).

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Well jokes

      Better than sick jokes.

  10. T. F. M. Reader

    Haven't they read

    Asimov's "Jokester"?

    Two questions to ask a supercomputer:

    1. Where do jokes come from?

    2. What will be the effect on the human race of discovering the answer to the first question?

    No man will ever laugh again.

  11. JDX Gold badge

    I like my relationships like I like my source code... open

    Come on you silly computer, open-source programmers don't have girlfriends.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I like my relationships like I like my source code... open

      ... black-on-white ?

      ... white-on-blue ?

      ... imaginary ?

      ... web based ?

      ... paid for ?

      ... pre-compiled ?

      ... bloated ?

      so many options.

    2. TheOtherHobbes

      Re: I like my relationships like I like my source code... open

      That's because Open Source code is a dangerous asexual lifeform that uses Open Source programmers to reproduce and evolve.

      You think 'Fork Me on GitHub' is a joke?

  12. Natalie Gritpants
    Paris Hilton

    I like my sex-partners like I like my cocoa: hot, thick and rich. Like the lady to the right.

  13. andreas koch
    WTF?

    Breakthrough? Boffins?

    I'm not all quite that sure, of course, but to me that looks like a bit of text trawling, a two-column table and a random number generator.

    Big data and eggheads? More the level of bored 13-year-olds on a Commodore C64 in 1984.

    But, who am I . . .

    1. Naughtyhorse

      bored 13-year-olds on a Commodore C64 in 1984.

      You are in a cave, to the south is a crappy rubber crystal...

      ahhh the good old days, laughed for days at that one.

  14. Simon Harris
    Trollface

    Computer generated jokes...

    ... still funnier than Michael McIntyre!

  15. Arachnoid

    Too many invertebytes in the jokes

    1. Will Godfrey Silver badge
      Happy

      I would like twos complement you on that one.

  16. Daniel Bower

    There are

    10 types of people in this world-those that understand binary and those that don't...

  17. Steve Todd

    Roses are green?

    Anyway the two classic programmer jokes are :-

    There are 10 types of programmers, those who understand binary and those who don't.

    God is real, unless defined as integer (FORTRAN knowledge needed for this one)

    1. PhilBuk

      Re: Roses are green?

      God is REAL - unless explicitly defined as INTEGER.

      Phil.

    2. Rukario

      Re: Roses are green?

      There are 10 types of programmers, those who understand binary and those who don't.

      And those who confuse binary with ternary.

  18. CADmonkey

    I like my women like I like my whiskey....

    n years old and mixed up in coke

  19. CADmonkey

    an infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar

    first one says he'll have a pint

    second one wants a half

    next one wants a quarter

    and so on.

    After a while the barman puts 2 pints on the bar and tells them to sort it out themselves.

  20. Ian 31

    Mainframe programmer joke.

    Why do programmers confuse Christmas and Halloween?

    Because OCT 31 = DEC 25

    When I started on DMIV hierarchical databases running on GCOS 8 the above was considered extremely funny.

  21. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Two strings walk into a bar.

    The first string says to the bartender, "I'll have a beer."

    The second string says, "Give me the same.gÄà#¥`³#¥`³#¥`³*Ýó³)¥`³°ëø³"¥`³LÓþ³'¥`³LÓʳ0¥`³LÓ˳/¥`³LÓü³*¥`³#¥a³w¤`³LÓϳ%"

    The first string turns to the bartender apologetically and says, "Sorry about my friend - he's not null-terminated."

  22. JB

    Computers and surreal humour

    I well remember in about 1981 we had an RML-380Z at school that had a limerick generator. It just used random words, though the parts of speech were in the correct places, so the grammar was correct. Yes, alot of the output was rubbish, but sometimes it would come up with the most ridiculous combinations that you couldn't help but laugh at. No doubt the system mentioned int he article is much more intelligent, but sounds like all that processing power hasn't improved much on a noisy box with a green-screen monitor attached.

  23. TheRealRoland

    But when will it do...

    "This baby seal walks into a club..."

    "A dyslexic walks into a bra..."

    Etc. etc. etc.

  24. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Edgy computer comedy

    "The one-liners were produced by searching for connections between pairings of words using Google n-gram data and Wordnet's part-of-speech tags."

    Remember, it's only acceptable for a computer to make n-gram data jokes.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Facepalm

      Re: Edgy computer comedy

      Ugh.

  25. Frumious Bandersnatch

    "It was a blonde."

    "A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window" (Raymond Chandler)

    OK, so it's not, technically speaking, a joke, but as we've been discussing how we like our women ...

  26. John H Woods Silver badge

    What's yellow and equivalent to the axiom of choice?

    Zorn's Lemon

  27. Snar
    Stop

    How long is a piece of string?

    Twice the length from it's centre to one end...

  28. Benchops

    > there's some way to go until computers are as funny as their human masters

    Have you met the people who programmed this?

  29. This post has been deleted by its author

  30. Dick Pountain

    A Forth programmer asks for a beer and walks backwards into a bar....

  31. Chris 69

    There was a programmer

    There was a programmer so bright,

    That his code ran much faster than light,

    He debugged it one day

    In a Relative way

    But it crashed on the previous night.

  32. Will Godfrey Silver badge

    I remember a SF story where a scientist discovered that the really funny, ROTFL jokes weren't actually created by humans but by an alien race of psychologists, to test our reactions and communication. However, when the scientist published his findings the aliens abandoned the experiment as the results would now be tainted. After this nobody could remember a single really, really, funny joke.

    Can you?

  33. Coen Dijkgraaf

    The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress

    Sound like they are trying to create Mike from The Moon is a Harsh Mistress who is a HOLMES IV ("High-Optional, Logical, Multi-Evaluating Supervisor, Mark IV") computer that also developed a sense of humour.

  34. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The two most common types of software errors

    are concuBuffer overru@1!dsf#$!rency errors, and off-by one errors.

  35. Zadkiel

    yum

    I like my coffee like I like my women.

    Ground up and stored in the freezer.

  36. Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

    Highbrow jokes

    From the Indy a few weeks ago:

    http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/how-many-surrealists-does-it-take-to-screw-in-a-light-bulb-a-fish-the-most-highbrow-jokes-in-the-world-8691191.html

  37. Benchops

    Q: Why did the chicken cross the Möbius band?

    A: To get to the same side

  38. Dr Patrick J R Harkin

    I like my women like I like my coffee...

    Cold, and bitter.

  39. Anonymous Coward
    Boffin

    Deep in the desert I feel like an electron

    I try to stay positive but these few annoying sand flies keep orbiting around me!

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