J
John Corliss
Here is the paper:
http://www.pdos.lcs.mit.edu/scigen/rooter.pdf
here's the generator:
http://www.pdos.lcs.mit.edu/scigen/
MIT students pull prank on conference, computer-generated gibberish
submitted, accepted
CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts (Reuters) -- In a victory for pranksters at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a bunch of computer-generated
gibberish masquerading as an academic paper has been accepted at a
scientific conference.
Jeremy Stribling said Thursday that he and two fellow MIT graduate
students questioned the standards of some academic conferences, so they
wrote a computer program to generate research papers complete with
"context-free grammar," charts and diagrams.
The trio submitted two of the randomly assembled papers to the World
Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI),
scheduled to be held July 10-13 in Orlando, Florida.
To their surprise, one of the papers -- "Rooter: A Methodology for the
Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy" -- was accepted for
presentation.
The prank recalled a 1996 hoax in which New York University physicist
Alan Sokal succeeded in getting an entire paper with a mix of truths,
falsehoods, non sequiturs and otherwise meaningless mumbo-jumbo
published in the quarterly journal Social Text, published by Duke
University Press.
Stribling said he and his colleagues only learned about the Social Text
affair after submitting their paper.
"Rooter" features such mind-bending gems as: "the model for our
heuristic consists of four independent components: simulated annealing,
active networks, flexible modalities, and the study of reinforcement
learning" and "We implemented our scatter/gather I/O server in
Simula-67, augmented with opportunistically pipelined extensions."
Stribling said the trio targeted WMSCI because it is notorious within
the field of computer science for sending copious e-mails that solicit
admissions to the conference.
The idea of a fake submission was to counter "fake conferences...which
exist only to make money," explained Stribling and his cohorts' website,
"SCIgen - An Automatic CS Paper Generator."
"Our aim is to maximize amusement, rather than coherence," it said. The
website allows users to "Generate a Random Paper" themselves, with
fields for inserting "optional author names."
"Contrarily, the lookaside buffer might not be the panacea..."
Nagib Callaos, a conference organizer, said the paper was one of a small
number accepted on a "non-reviewed" basis -- meaning that reviewers had
not yet given their feedback by the acceptance deadline.
"We thought that it might be unfair to refuse a paper that was not
refused by any of its three selected reviewers," Callaos wrote in an
e-mail. "The author of a non-reviewed paper has complete responsibility
of the content of their paper."
However, Callaos said conference organizers were reviewing their
acceptance procedures in light of the hoax.
Asked whether he would disinvite the MIT students, Callos replied,
"Bogus papers should not be included in the conference program."
Stribling said conference organizers had not yet formally rescinded
their invitation to present the paper.
The students were soliciting cash donations so they could attend the
conference and give what Stribling billed as a "completely
randomly-generated talk, delivered entirely with a straight face."
They exceeded their goal, with $2,311.09 cents from 165 donors.
--
Regards from John Corliss
I don't reply to trolls.
No adware, cdware, commercial software, crippleware, demoware, nagware,
shareware, spyware, time-limited software, trialware, viruses or warez
please.
http://www.pdos.lcs.mit.edu/scigen/rooter.pdf
here's the generator:
http://www.pdos.lcs.mit.edu/scigen/
MIT students pull prank on conference, computer-generated gibberish
submitted, accepted
CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts (Reuters) -- In a victory for pranksters at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a bunch of computer-generated
gibberish masquerading as an academic paper has been accepted at a
scientific conference.
Jeremy Stribling said Thursday that he and two fellow MIT graduate
students questioned the standards of some academic conferences, so they
wrote a computer program to generate research papers complete with
"context-free grammar," charts and diagrams.
The trio submitted two of the randomly assembled papers to the World
Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI),
scheduled to be held July 10-13 in Orlando, Florida.
To their surprise, one of the papers -- "Rooter: A Methodology for the
Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy" -- was accepted for
presentation.
The prank recalled a 1996 hoax in which New York University physicist
Alan Sokal succeeded in getting an entire paper with a mix of truths,
falsehoods, non sequiturs and otherwise meaningless mumbo-jumbo
published in the quarterly journal Social Text, published by Duke
University Press.
Stribling said he and his colleagues only learned about the Social Text
affair after submitting their paper.
"Rooter" features such mind-bending gems as: "the model for our
heuristic consists of four independent components: simulated annealing,
active networks, flexible modalities, and the study of reinforcement
learning" and "We implemented our scatter/gather I/O server in
Simula-67, augmented with opportunistically pipelined extensions."
Stribling said the trio targeted WMSCI because it is notorious within
the field of computer science for sending copious e-mails that solicit
admissions to the conference.
The idea of a fake submission was to counter "fake conferences...which
exist only to make money," explained Stribling and his cohorts' website,
"SCIgen - An Automatic CS Paper Generator."
"Our aim is to maximize amusement, rather than coherence," it said. The
website allows users to "Generate a Random Paper" themselves, with
fields for inserting "optional author names."
"Contrarily, the lookaside buffer might not be the panacea..."
Nagib Callaos, a conference organizer, said the paper was one of a small
number accepted on a "non-reviewed" basis -- meaning that reviewers had
not yet given their feedback by the acceptance deadline.
"We thought that it might be unfair to refuse a paper that was not
refused by any of its three selected reviewers," Callaos wrote in an
e-mail. "The author of a non-reviewed paper has complete responsibility
of the content of their paper."
However, Callaos said conference organizers were reviewing their
acceptance procedures in light of the hoax.
Asked whether he would disinvite the MIT students, Callos replied,
"Bogus papers should not be included in the conference program."
Stribling said conference organizers had not yet formally rescinded
their invitation to present the paper.
The students were soliciting cash donations so they could attend the
conference and give what Stribling billed as a "completely
randomly-generated talk, delivered entirely with a straight face."
They exceeded their goal, with $2,311.09 cents from 165 donors.
--
Regards from John Corliss
I don't reply to trolls.
No adware, cdware, commercial software, crippleware, demoware, nagware,
shareware, spyware, time-limited software, trialware, viruses or warez
please.