How New Yorker cartoons could teach computers to be funny - CNET

The usefulness of these new algorithms doesn't help just one, lowly assistant (My apologies, Colin). Professor Rob Nowak, who led the Madison team, said the crowdsourcing algorithms, after being honed by fresh caption contest data every week, could be used to answer big questions in science, engineering and medicine.

Because the algorithms can tease out the best choice from many options, fast, they could help us create better drugs to fight viruses or design more secure communication networks. Ultimately, the data collected might even be able to teach a computer to understand what's funny -- and, perhaps, one day leave human comedians sweating as they work to up their routines.

The bottom line: the caption contest is...no laughing matter (Sorry for that one; I couldn't help myself).

"We really are trying to create algorithms that are trying to attack more serious applications," said Kevin Jamieson, a researcher at University of Califoia-Berkeley who worked on the crowdsourcing algorithms. "These examples are kind of like practice for the real-world problems we want to solve tomorrow."

What's so funny?

During my visit to The New Yorker, Mankoff walked me through the new voting tool in his office, which he decorated with a large framed picture of the magazine's 1997 cartoon issue cover and stocked with cartooning and comedy books. There are two wo volumes of "The World Encyclopedia of Cartoons."

On Mankoff's computer screen, a web page presented us with one of the latest caption contest cartoons -- three men in suits holding one giant briefcase -- paired with one submitted caption at a time. Undeeath were three buttons: unfunny, somewhat funny and funny. Mankoff quickly clicked through a bunch of captions (he's been cartoon editor since 1997, so for him this was a breeze) while offering tips on the humor of each one.

"'He not heavy. He's my broker'," Mankoff said, reading one submission out loud.

"That's weird," he added with a laugh before clicking the "unfunny" button. Why the fail? "It doesn't quite explain why -- it's not providing an answer to the comic puzzle."

As Mankoff clicked through one caption after another, algorithms behind the scenes were feverishly trying to bubble up the very best captions, using the responses from Mankoff and many others. The computer models Nowak and his team are developing are called adaptive crowdsourcing algorithms. They attempt to weed out the weakest captions as quickly as possible to get more people to vote on the potential winners.

"We want to drive the crowd on the top funniest captions," Nowak explained, "instead of wasting their time with the ones that aren't that funny."

Nowak wants to develop an adaptive algorithm that could direct scientists to perform lab tests that are most likely to net the needed results, just like directing voters to the potentially funniest captions. Using that kind of software could save money by shaving hours off countless research projects. He talks about trying to uncover the right genes for virus replication, as an example.

"It's kind of like the contest," Nowak said. "You really want to find the winners or the really important things, rather than just the good things."

Yucks, gags and algorithms

This isn't the first time Mankoff has teamed up with computer scientists to study the caption contest, a once annual affair that's been going on weekly since 2005. Last year, he worked with Microsoft researchers to create a computer program that figures out which caption submissions were funniest. It predicted which of two captions was funnier 64 percent of the time. That's pretty good for a robot, but not good enough for Mankoff to use.

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But all this research could help nudge forward the slow work of teaching a computer what's funny, something that scientists think could improve human-computer interactions and make digital voice assistants like Apple's Siri sound less stiff. Mankoff, who dropped out of an experimental psychology Ph.D. program before falling into cartooning, has a keen interest in such issues.

"It fuels his imagination," David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, said of Mankoff's academic dissections. "I don't think it makes him any funnier, it makes him more intelligent. He was plenty funny before."