Computer-generated gibberish

CNNreported 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.

Joanne Jacobs blogged You can write your own meaningless computer science paper by using the paper generator at their SCIgen site. I tried it myself and came up with this:

Mitch Berg blogged If you love the English Language but fear its gatekeepers, read the whole thing.

Betsy Newmark blogged First of all, why did the three reviewers not reject the paper immediately? Had they read it? And why accept non-reviewed papers for a conference that people are presumably spending money and time on attending. It sounds like a conference that only exists so that people will have something to put on their resume. Kudus to the kids. Maybe they should be invited next year to present a paper on how they designed their program that lets people spoof the gibberish that is many scholarly papers.

I agree with Betsy. I think they should present a paper on how they designed a program that can write a "scholarly paper" that can fool the people selecting papers for presentation.