Our Story

A competition to create the funniest computer ever.  The challenge is for a robot to be funnier than the best human standup comedian in front of a live audience by 2020.  In the first instance the competition would be an annual computer versus computer contest with human judges, similar to the Loebner prize.  We anticipate the first contest being held in December 2012.   More details at: http://funniestcomputer.neurogrid.com/

All this inspired by chats at, and trips to the pub after, the London Stanford AI/ML class meetups

The Impact

We're hoping to make computers more fun to interact with, and have a laugh during the process.

What We Need & What You Get

We're hoping to get a small amount of funding ($5000) as prize money and administration costs for the competition.  The majority of the money should go to the prize money to be awarded to the funniest computer, but we'd love to have $500 or so cover incidental costs such as domain name registration, paying grad students to help process some of the data etc.

Funders will get first access to the computer generated jokes as well as jokes created in their honour, and top funders will get the right to sit on the judges panel for the funniest computer,

Other Ways You Can Help

We hope to start slowly and build up.  In the first instance we'd love your input on format, approaches etc.  What we'd love the most is entries into the competition to be the funniest computer ever!

Robot image by Sebastian Lund, shared through flickr under creative commons license 2.0