libes@nbs-amrf.UUCP (Don Libes) (03/11/85)
I've been waiting for some good AI jokes but haven't seen a one. If I had saved the announcement for the AI joke contest, I would enter this one. However, I must admit I read it in Ted Nelson's Computer Lib (published in 1974). A very large artificial-intelligence system had been built for the military to help in long-range policy planning; financed by Arpa, with people from MIT, Stanford, CMU and so on. "The system is now ready to answer questions" said the spokesman for the project. A four-star general bit off the end of a cigar, looked whimsically at his comrades and said-- "Ask the machine this: Will it be Peace or War?" The clerk-typist (GS3) translated this into the query language and typed it in. The machine replied: Yes. "Yes what?!?!" bellowed the general. The operator typed in the query. Came the answer: Yes, SIR! Don Libes {seismo,umcp-cs}!nbs-amrf!libes
smith@umn-cs.UUCP (03/14/85)
I don't know if this is a joke 'anyone' can understand, but I still think the BEST AI joke was an old story about Eliza and a case of mistaken identity. The whole story is in "Machines Who Think." In the early 60s BBN was doing research on remote computing, timesharing, etc. on their PDP-1 and a couple of the researchers had installed teletypes and modems in their homes. One day, a VP walked up to the PDP-1's teletype which showed the message: "Type in what you want to say and end it with a period." The vice president was used to the idea of using the teletype to converse with other people (like one does with Unix 'write') so he assumed that the terminal was connected to one of the researchers at home. In fact, the PDP-1 was running Eliza at the time. The conversation went somethin like this: VP: Can I take over the machine some time this afternoon. Eliza: Why do you ask? VP: I have some potential customers I want to demonstrate it to. Eliza: Is this important to you? VP: Of course it is. I don't remember the rest of the conversation in detail, except that the VP got more and more annoyed while Eliza, of course, continued to question and pry without commiting to anything. Finally the VP ordered the guy to phone him, but forgot to end his sentencce with a period, so Eliza said no more. This made the VP really mad so he finally called the researcher himself: VP: Why are being so obtuse? (yelling) Researcher: Why are you asking why I am being so obtuse? which is, of course, a classic Eliza reply.