www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/science/04/14/mit.prank.reut -> www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/science/04/14/mit.prank.reut/
CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts (Reuters) -- In a victory for pranksters at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a bunch of computer-generated gib berish masquerading as an academic paper has been accepted at a scientif ic conference. Jeremy Stribling said Thursday that he and two fellow MIT graduate studen ts questioned the standards of some academic conferences, so they wrote a computer program to generate research papers complete with "context-fr ee grammar," charts and diagrams. The trio submitted two of the randomly assembled papers to the World Mult i-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI), schedule d to be held July 10-13 in Orlando, Florida. To their surprise, one of the papers -- "Rooter: A Methodology for the Ty pical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy" -- was accepted for p resentation. The prank recalled a 1996 hoax in which New York University physicist Ala n Sokal succeeded in getting an entire paper with a mix of truths, false hoods, 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 a ffair after submitting their paper. "Rooter" features such mind-bending gems as: "the model for our heuristic consists of four independent components: simulated annealing, active ne tworks, flexible modalities, and the study of reinforcement learning" an d "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 admi ssions to the conference. which ex ist 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 w ebsite allows users to "Generate a Random Paper" themselves, with fields for inserting "optional author names." " 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 refuse d 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 co ntent of their paper." However, Callaos said conference organizers were reviewing their acceptan ce 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 conf erence and give what Stribling billed as a "completely randomly-generate d talk, delivered entirely with a straight face."
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