We’ve come a long way since the invention of the emoticon. Source: Supplied

And that’s exactly why it was invented 33 years ago, when a group of “tech nerds” were trying to avoid any confusion over their sarcastic jokes.

The computer scientists of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh were tossing around ideas for how to indicate humour while chatting on the university’s online message boards in 1982.

Professor Scott Fahlman came up with the deceptively simple idea of using a series of symbols that looked like a smiley face if you turned them on their side :-). He had a way to express the opposite emotion, too :-(.

Just like that, Dr Fahlman became the legendary “father of the emoticon”. But he’s always had far bigger ideas.

The artificial intelligence expert hands out smiley-face cookies every September at the university, on the anniversary of his emoticon eureka moment. But the celebrations would be far sweeter for the professor if he saw his pet project, Scone, gain the same success.

Scone — or Scalable Ontology Engine — is an attempt at creating a “flexible, human-like” robot, according to one of Dr Fahlman’s research papers.

He admits to finding much-praised existing examples of AI “a disappointment in terms of achieving its original goal: to understand and, ultimately, to replicate the computational mechanisms responsible for human-like intelligence.”

Now Scott Fahlman wants to create a robot that can make us smile. Source: AP

What Dr Fahlman is trying to create is not another machine that provides a brilliant solution to specific problems, but a broadly humanoid creature, like Wall-E or R2D2.

“A few of us stubborn old guys and a few of our idealistic young students are still trying to work on it,” the professor told Narratively. To a purist like him, Siri will never be more than a “parlour trick”.

But time is running out for Dr Fahlman to make his robotic dream a reality. His funding comes to an end in December and he has big plans to execute.

He intends to share Scone as open-source software online, as well as writing a tutorial book on his AI findings, and he hopes the knowledge will be used to create bigger and better machines.

Dr Fahlman still dreams that Scone will fit the old-fashioned model of what a robot should be: speaking and understanding English, recognising ideas and having a wide breadth of knowledge about the world.

Despite being responsible for today’s most modern form of communication, this computer scientist is resolutely traditional at heart.

That old-school sensibility is evident in a post on his website called “Smiley lore”, in which he recounts the story of creating the emoticon.

“Within a few months, we started seeing the lists with dozens of “smilies”: open-mouthed surprise, person wearing glasses, Abraham Lincoln, Santa Claus, the pope, and so on,” he writes. “Producing such clever compilations has become a serious hobby for some people.

“It’s interesting to note that Microsoft and AOL now intercept these character strings and turn them into little pictures. Personally, I think this destroys the whimsical element of the original.”