[NOTE: On September 22, 2021 we more or less solved the problem. See the end of this blog post for the happy news about that. The original blog post was written on September 13, while we were intensely wrestling with the problem.] YouTube’s notorious takedown algorithms are blocking the video of the 2021 Ig Nobel […]
Tag: algorithm
Renewed Interest in Octonions
“There are exactly four normed division algebras: the real numbers (R), complex numbers (C), quaternions (H), and octonions (O). The real numbers are the dependable breadwinner of the family, the complete ordered field we all rely on. The complex numbers are a slightly flashier but still respectable younger brother: not ordered, but algebraically complete. The […]
AIR U.S. Presidential Election Algorithm Falsified
AIR U.S. Presidential Election Algorithm Falsified by Eric Schulman and Daniel Debowy The Annals of Improbable Research United States Presidential Election Algorithm (Debowy and Schulman, AIR Online, 20 October 2003) was developed based on the experience of the major party candidates for president and vice president in each of the 54 United States presidential elections […]
A sarcastic tweet detection algorithm
Is it possible to build a sarcasm detector classification algorithm for Twitter tweets? This was the question facing Christine Liebrecht, Florian Kunneman and Antal van den Bosch at the Centre for Language Studies, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands, in 2013. And the answer, in broad terms, was found to be ‘yes’ – in fact the […]
Algorithm Predicts Hillary Clinton will defeat Donald Trump to become the 45th President of the United States
by Eric Schulman and Daniel Debowy July 28, 2016 Now that both major U.S. political parties have announced their nominees for president and vice president and the nominees have accepted these nominations, the Annals of Improbable Research U.S. Presidential Election Algorithm (Debowy and Schulman 2003) can be used to predict the results of the upcoming […]
Bust detection algorithm
Around 2006, concerns were being raised regarding the (what was then) the newly emerging technology of 3-D full-body scanners. “These high-resolution scanned images reveal human body details and have raised privacy concerns. Airport and transport officials in several countries are refusing to run a test trial with the scanners until a more suitable way to […]
Professor Bender’s Kissing Goodbye Algorithm
“Given a rectangular room with n people in it, what is the most efficient way for each pair of people to kiss each other goodbye?“ Professor Bender, (pictured, of the Department of Computer Science, Stony Brook University, New York) along with his colleagues Ritwik Bose, Rezaul Chowdhury and Samuel McCauley, have made progress towards an […]
Knitting a recursive sweater
“Knitting is usually considered a female activity and females are usually not considered to be inclined to mathematics, or to science in general. Nevertheless mathematical skills are necessary for knitting, because they help to realize symmetries, inversions, scalings and proportions; good abstraction capabilities are indeed needed to figure the final result out and to map […]
Explaining the Tootsie Pop Algorithm
Mark Huber and Sarah Schott prepared a lecture called “Using TPA [the Tootsie Pop Algorithm] for Monte Carlo integration.” The authors are at Claremont McKenna College and Duke University, respectively. You can see their presentation online, if you want to. The algorithm can be used to try to answer the [somewhat ill-defined] question: How many licks […]
Towards a robust nipple detector
Increases in raw computing power and novel algorithmic techniques have enabled outstanding advances in image processing since 1999, when Drs. Forsyth and Fleck developed the first computerised system for Automatic Detection of Human Nudes. Now, researchers at the Institute for Infocomm Research, I²R (pronounced as i-squared-r), which is part of A*STAR, Singapore, have refined the […]