This year it’s CADIE. Here’s the video, message and a screenshot from Google April Fool’s Day joke 2009:
Announcement
March 31st, 2009 11:59:59 pmIntroducing CADIE
Research group switches on world’s first “artificial intelligence” tasked-array system.
For several years now a small research group has been working on some challenging problems in the areas of neural networking, natural language and autonomous problem-solving. Last fall this group achieved a significant breakthrough: a powerful new technique for solving reinforcement learning problems, resulting in the first functional global-scale neuro-evolutionary learning cluster.
Since then progress has been rapid, and tonight we’re pleased to announce that just moments ago, the world’s first Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity (CADIE) was switched on and began performing some initial functions. It’s an exciting moment that we’re determined to build upon by coming to understand more fully what CADIE’s emergence might mean, for Google and for our users. So although CADIE technology will be rolled out with the caution befitting any advance of this magnitude, in the months to come users can expect to notice her influence on various google.com properties. Earlier today, for instance, CADIE deduced from a quick scan of the visual segment of the social web a set of online design principles from which she derived this intriguing homepage.
These are merely the first steps onto what will doubtless prove a long and difficult road. Considerable bugs remain in CADIE’S programming, and considerable development clearly is called for. But we can’t imagine a more important journey for Google to have undertaken.
For more information about CADIE see this monograph, and follow CADIE’s progress via her YouTube channel and blog.
My favoriate part is the “All your personal World Wide Website belong to CADIE “, which was based on the flash animation phenomenon in 2001, whereby us tech geeks were walking around chanting “all of your base are belong to us”.
Thanks Google for reminding us of how geeky we Internet nerds are, and for dedicating your April Fools Day joke of 2009 to us!
