Inside UC Berkeley's High Tech Joke Recommender

alphadogg writes "Every day is something like April Fools' Day at the University of California, Berkeley joke recommendation site, dubbed Jester. Now on Version 4.0, the site tosses visitors a handful of jokes to rate on a scale of "less funny" to "more funny." It then recommends jokes based on the user's taste (or lack thereof), dynamically making recommendations based on the user's most recent ratings. Jester's more than a joke jukebox though. Underlying it is a Berkeley-patented "collaborative filtering algorithm" dubbed Eigentaste , now on Version 5.0. The more people who use the system and rate jokes, the more data Berkeley researchers have to advance their understanding of recommendation systems, like those used by Amazon.com and other Web sites."

Comments

Link to Berkeley's Site

[wchatam]

http://eigentaste.berkeley.edu/user/jokes.php

I for one...

[Leuf]

would be filtered out completely by this, but I welcome our new humor overlords anyway.

That didn't last long.

[argent]

Could not connect to user database: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (11)

I didn't get this one:

[IorDMUX]

After about five minutes of training, Jester started finding a fair number of jokes that I found humorous, even if they all scored highly on the "nerd" scale.

However, I didn't quite understand the punchline when it gave me this one:

Could not connect to user database: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (11)

Could anyone clear that up for me?

The first suggested joke:

[felipekk]

"Invalid query: Table 'jester5_emptyjokeclusters' is marked as crashed and should be repaired"

God it really works! I found this one to be very funny! LOL

SQL Jokes

[penguinwhoflew]

"Invalid query: Table 'jester5_emptyjokeclusters' is marked as crashed and should be repaired"
Hahahahaha that's HILARIOUS! ...err, wait, I don't quite get it.

My sense of humor crashed the joke program!

[caffiend666]

My sense of humor crashed the joke program!

Invalid query: Table 'jester5_emptyjokeclusters' is marked as crashed and should be repaired

So, who wants to file a bug report on this one? Wonder if someone played a joke on them by submitting their website to Slashdot?

What I got:

[Telecommando]

"Invalid query: Table 'jester5_emptyjokeclusters' is marked as crashed and should be repaired"

Hey, that's pretty funny!