Presenter : Noah Cooper
Mentor : Michael Hennessy
Major : Computer & Information Science
Poster 13
Heaven is where the police are English, the cooks are French, the mechanics are German, the lovers are Italian, and it’s all organized by the Swiss. Hell is where the police are German, the cooks are English, the mechanics are French, the lovers are Swiss, and it’s all organized by the Italians.” So goes the well-known joke reflecting some positive and negative stereotypes of European nations. Every intellectual community, too, has its famous methods, theories, and authors — each known for its merits as well as its shortcomings. So it would seem fertile ground for parodies of the European Heaven & Hell joke. But it turns out this joke has a peculiar structure that re- sists parody. My work analyzes that structure, demonstrating why an ad-hoc attempt at parody is prone to fail. It proposes an alternative algorithmic approach to generating parodies based on matching theory, a subfield of graph theory in finite mathematics. In so doing, I hope it makes some small contribution to the body of knowledge on computer-generated humor and the semantics of humor.“noise” produced by background turbulence may inhibit the capacity of the ctenophore to detect and respond to fluid motions produced by its prey.