On the implementation of humor...

Cool! April Fool's Day. Well, I did not hear a lot of jokes today, luckily, but I guess that others will have been fooled at some point one way or another.

From cognitive science, I am very interested in the analysis of humor... What is humor? I'm not asking how to tell a good joke or what makes a good joke, but on a lower level I'm trying to understand when we find something funny. So how come something is experienced as funny?

I define humor as the deviation of the most logical / expected path of the change of the context (your expectation) towards something that you didn't immediately see coming as part of the analysis of the development of the story. Well, that's a joke anyway, otherwise if you did expect it, it wouldn't be all that funny. The best jokes and joke tellers keep you from the other logical, explainable path long enough until the punch line, where the actual context all becomes clear.

All well and good... Star Trek seems to suggest that Data could not understand humor, as if humor in its essence would be pure human emotion. Since machines don't by default have access to emotional responses (if emotion is the driving force of our life, in the sense that it is at the basis of our decisions in the morning to get up and start doing something), then Star Trek would assert that Data couldn't laugh at some joke because he didn't have access to an emotional organ or simulation of such.

I'm not sure of that assertion made in the series. I think humor isn't as much emotional, but more a trigger (spike?) in your brain that brings forward an emotional reaction (laughter). That little difference is very large. Scientists performed experiments on "aha" moments, those quick moments that you have solved a puzzle and can complete it in its entirety. Those "aha" moments were accompanied by huge spikes of brain activity for a very short time, after which the context of some problem should be entirely clear.

I do imagine humor (specifically for now) thus to be an emotional reaction to a relatively simple discovery in the brain that the context and path we've been led to believe (our expectation) is not the real path we should have taken to develop the context (chain of symbols) of some story. And by "shifting" this context the right way due to more information becoming available (the punch line), we feel a response to this "aha" moment when the brain solves it. Also, if you concentrate, you can rather easily suppress the urge to laugh in a great extent. (does that suggest that laughter and humor are quite conscious processes?).

(could you say then that the closer the expectation is to the actually developed context, it makes the joke funnier or vice-versa, the farther away using the same words makes it funnier?).

So, anyway, that means that there might be ways to detect humor by software as well, provided there is software that can develop expectations and interpret contexts the same way our brain can.

Therefore, Data won't probably actually laugh in the same way that we humans do (since biologically we react to that aha moment), but probably it is possible to detect if something is humorous by analyzing the contextual difference in two different snapshots of the context and then send the appropriate signals to react to it. Of course... Data is most likely not culturally apt as he does lack real biologically induced emotions, so he may very well laugh inappropriately in contexts that are culturally sensitive (imagine!). But that is another story.