Randomly Generated Paper Accepted to Conference

mldqj writes "Some students at MIT wrote a program called SCIgen - An Automatic CS Paper Generator. From their website: SCIgen is a program that generates random Computer Science research papers, including graphs, figures, and citations. What's amazing is that one of their randomly generated paper was accepted to WMSCI 2005. Now they are accepting donation to fund their trip to the conference and give a randomly generated talk."

Patents application

Their original plan was to do this with a patent application instead... but decided they needed a challenge.

In other news...

In other news a randomly generated story submission was accepted by /. moderators.

Re:In other news...

In other news a randomly generated story submission was accepted by /. moderators.

no joke. this is not new news.. legislators have been accepting papers without review for years.

Re:In other news...

Twice.

Random slashdot story generator

http://bbspot.com/toys/slashtitle/ [bbspot.com]

Admit it. You would swear you're looking at a real slashdot story :)

I'd hate to be a paper referee after this.

It's a thankless job to begin with. Now you have to approach each one with, "is this the real deal, or some bs-generated thing?"

Oh, and a collection of my as-yet unpublished white papers will be available soon. Cheap. :)

Re:I'd hate to be a paper referee after this.

Generally speaking, if you ever find yourself asking "Is this bullshit?" you already know the answer.

The blind publishing the blind.

Excerpt from the submitted paper:

We question the need for digital-to-analog converters. It should be noted that we allow DHCP to harness homogeneous epistemologies without the evaluation of evolutionary programming [2], [12], [14]. Contrarily,the lookaside buffer might not be the panacea that end-users expected. However, this method is never considered confusing. Our approach turns the knowledge-base communication sledgehammer into a scalpel.

I've received auto-generated spam emails that read a lot like this. Nice to know the WMSCI is on their toes...but judging from the content on their home page, I'm not surprised that they consider this paper conference material.

From the WMSCI's website:

Through WMSCI conferences, we are trying to relate the analytic thinking required in focused conference sessions, to the synthetic thinking, required for analogies generation, which calls for multi-focus domain and divergent thinking. We are trying to promote a synergic relation between analytically and synthetically oriented minds, as it is found between left and right brain hemispheres, by means of the corpus callosum. Then, WMSCI 2005 might be perceived as a research corpus callosum, trying to bridge analytically with synthetically oriented efforts, convergent with divergent thinkers and focused specialists with non-focused or multi-focused generalists.

What's scary is that the second paragraph was written by humans.

(FYI, the full text of the paper in question can be found here [mit.edu], and the WMSCI website can be found here [iiisci.org].

Re:The blind publishing the blind.

People who act surprised by things like this don't read Dilbert nearly often enough.

It seems as though corporate America consists of people trying to write as much as possible without actually saying anything. If you don't believe me, go look at the mission statement of any big company. It doesn't read like English. If it did, they might be expected to actually make something concrete.

Re:The blind publishing the blind.

"If you don't believe me, go look at the mission statement of any big company. It doesn't read like English."

How else do you expect them to stretch "To make money" out to fill up an entire page?

Re:The blind publishing the blind.

It gets worse... they submitted another paper that was rejected, they asked why, and got this [mit.edu] in reply (several paragraphs, complete with random statistics, to say "it's too much work for us to tell you.")

Re:The blind publishing the blind.

This is a problem that plagues most legal documents, user manuals, and scientific papers. I recall being very frustrated (not to mention bored out of my mind) reading published research material for a 3rd year psychology course. Of all the people, you would think at least psychologists would appreciate clear, concise descriptions.

Personally I think the problem is cultural and affects people who are intelligent and know it, but not intelligent enough that they feel they don't have to prove themselves. The more obscure your references are and the more complicated your train of thought, the smarter you must be, right?

Luckly there are folks like the Plain English Campaign [plainenglish.co.uk], " fighting for public information to be written in plain English." If you ever have to write a public document, I recommend reading through their Examples and Free Tutorials sections.

Hmm

Do they accept randomly generated quotes from Linus Torvalds? ;)

the question is..

Whats the equivalent monkeys per typewriter power of this software?

You're nomenclature is confused.

A monkey-typewriter (note: not monkey per typerwirter) is a unit of improbable entropy equal to the decible level of 350 grams of feces hurled at 1 ft per second into a plexiglass barrier.

Re:the question is..

Whats the equivalent monkeys per typewriter power of this software?

Good thinking! I hereby propose a new unit for measuring intelligence: the MBOTY (monkey-banging-on-typewriter-years). From basic probability theory, this number is certainly always finite -- and in some cases, very much so.

Cheers,
IT

Have a randomly generated comment

I for one welcome our new randomly generated comment/story overlords from soviet russia where comment posts you.

Not surprising at all

It's always been well-known that if you can't get your paper published in a refereed journal, you can probably get it published in some conference proceedings. I've even used this trick while I was in academia.

At the larger conferences they make some attempt at screening out the known crackpots. The amount of effort varies.

Re:Not surprising at all

Yup, this conference looks like one of those used to buff resumes. If you look at the "Academic and Industry sponsors" page, you will notice that NO major universities or societies are sponsoring this conference. I get a couple invitiations to things like this a month.

No big surprise

The organizers of this stupid conference (and also some "WSEAS conference on all and everything") keep spamming me with emails about how their deadlines have been extended and how I am invited to submit a paper. This just confirms that those conferences are total crap - if not outright scams.

Actually, a former professor of mine once did something similar. They submitted a paper that they had written by hand, but that didn't make any sense (something about evaluating footprints in dark rooms) to a conference that was known for its crap quality, and it was accepted. This broke that conference's neck, however.

With some luck, this thing will have a similar result.

Don't forget the great paper by Mazieres & Koh

Don't forget Mazieres and Kohler's great submission as well, "Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List" [nyu.edu]

I doubt they'll attend the conference now...

After this news item, I highly doubt they'll still be able to go to the conference.

It wasn't reviewed

So it's hardly supprising it wasn't rejected. That people orgaising conferences will accept papers just because no one can be arsed to read them is, of course, a different matter.

So, this doesn't come close to the sucess of Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity [nyu.edu] which got into a peer reviewed journal.

My complaint about slashdot

Click here [pakin.org] before you moderate!!!

I, not being one of the many insolent, vicious used-car salesmen of this world, am going to make this short but sweet: In this era of rising sesquipedalianism, we must shine a light on slashdot's efforts to test another formula for silencing serious opposition. That's self-evident, and even slashdot would probably agree with me on that. Even so, I have to wonder where it got the idea that it is my view that my bitterness at it is merely the latent projection of libidinal energy stemming from self-induced anguish. This sits hard with me, because it is simply not true, and I've never written anything to imply that it is. Let's start with my claim that slashdot's inveracities are based on a technique I'm sure you've heard of. It's called "lying". I like to think I'm a reasonable person, but you just can't reason with brutal, disgusting junkies. It's been tried. They don't understand, they can't understand, they don't want to understand, and they will die without understanding why all we want is for them not to keep us perennially behind the eight ball. Now, I don't mean for that to sound pessimistic, although if you're interested in the finagling, double-dealing, chicanery, cheating, cajolery, cunning, rascality, and abject villainy by which slashdot may impose a particular curriculum, vision of history, and method of pedagogy on our school systems one of these days, then you'll want to consider the following very carefully. You'll especially want to consider that I want to give people more information about slashdot, help them digest and assimilate and understand that information, and help them draw responsible conclusions from it. Here's one conclusion I definitely hope people draw: Slashdot's callous, raving beliefs (as I would certainly not call them logically reasoned arguments) condemn innocent people to death. Slashdot then blames us for that. Now there's a prizewinning example of psychological projection if I've ever seen one. I want to make this clear, so that those who do not understand deeper messages embedded within sarcastic irony -- and you know who I'm referring to -- can process my point.

Slashdot prizes wealth and celebrity over and above decent morals and sound judgment. Now, I could go off on that point alone, but it continuously seeks adulation from its bedfellows. If you doubt this, just ask around. I once had a nightmare in which slashdot was free to make widespread accusations and insinuations without having the facts to back them up. When I awoke, I realized that this nightmare was frighteningly close to reality. For instance, slashdot's magic-bullet explanations are thoroughly otiose. Let's remember that. This is not Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, where the state would be eager to instill distrust and thereby create a need for its dictatorial views. Not yet, at least. But it argues that the most ridiculous pip-squeaks you'll ever see are easily housebroken. I wish I could suggest some incontrovertible chain of apodictic reasoning that would overcome this argument, but the best I can do is the following: It possesses no significant intellectual skills whatsoever and has no interest in erudition. Heck, it can't even spell or define "erudition", much less achieve it. Slashdot says it's going to make a big deal out of nothing faster than you can say "gastrohysterorrhaphy". Is it out of its malign mind? The answer is fairly obvious when you consider that this is kind of a touchy subject to some people. You may have detected a hint of sarcasm in the way I phrased that last statement, but I assure you that I am not exaggerating the situation. This letter has gone on far too long, in my opinion, and probably yours as well. So let me end it by saying merely that slashdot measures the value of a man by the amount of profit it can realize from him.

EPIC

This story reminded me of the EPIC [gatech.edu] Flash (yeah yeah) video about the future of news media. Basically google ends up not just aggregating content by computer, but writing it by computer as well. Very interesting.