With my request to use Google’s black-box Prediction APIs finally approved and a little time available in my schedule, I set out to see how well Google’s racks of CPUs would do against a few training sets I had in mind.
Ultimately, I was hoping to gain more insight into the question: Can software algorithms (with help from the crowd) predict what I’ll like in books, movies, web sites, and food?
To make this a manageable project, I limited the scope of my exercise to the modest problem of predicting amusing movie titles.
Wait, don’t laugh! I have some definite ideas on this subject, which I was able to compress into simple rules. For example, a number or date with an exclamation after it, funny! I’m tickled by these somewhat hypothetical movie titles:“Ten!”, “1941!”, or this real knee slapper, “22!”
I’m also similarly affected by titles with a man or woman’s name that ends in a vowel followed by an exclamation or question mark. “Ralphie?” Hilarious. “Albert.” Not funny. And titles with “Being”, as in “Being Ralphie”, are funny in a knowing, ironic way.
So how did Google’s mysterious Prediction oracle do ?Continue reading