Greetings, professor Falken! Have you heard the one about the nice game of chess?

While true "artificial intelligence" is still more or less the stuff of science fiction, give the genre's wildest dreamers credit for foreseeing the great difficulty in replicating the human sense of humor.

Researchers at the University of Cincinnati are working on that.

Type a joke into Julia Taylor's computer, and it'll tell you whether it's worth a chuckle. As their project comes to a close, SHIRLEY SMITH talks with the programmers who have succeeded in teaching a computer to recognize certain types of "funny."

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asap contributor Shirley Smith is a correspondent in the AP's Broadcast News Center in Washington.