Scientific Conference Falls for Gibberish Prank
By Greg Frost
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (Reuters) - A bunch of computer-generated gibberish masquerading as an academic paper has been accepted at a scientific conference in a victory for pranksters at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Jeremy Stribling said on 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 nonsensical text, charts and diagrams.
The trio submitted two of the randomly assembled papers to the World Multiconference 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. [...]
"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.
"We were tired of the spam," Stribling told Reuters in a telephone interview, adding that his team wanted to challenge the standards of the conference's peer review process.
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, he replied: "Bogus papers should not be included in the conference program." [...]
And yes, I believe a review of procedures might be in order for WMSCI.
Posted by Terry Oglesby at April 15, 2005 12:57 PMOh man ... now I'm really going to have to write my own posts. And comments.
Posted by: MarcV at April 15, 2005 01:17 PMI always thought those were computer generated papers since the language never made any sense. Look at the name of the "conference": World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI). That looks computer generated ot me.
Posted by: Larry Anderson at April 15, 2005 01:46 PMOt me, oot.
Posted by: Terry Oglesby at April 15, 2005 01:48 PMWe have already established that accurate typing is among the many skills I do not have. It works a lot better here than when I was a Fortran programmer (obviously right after the end of the Dark Ages). Then merely putting a semicolon where a colon should be was a big deal.
Posted by: Larry Anderson at April 15, 2005 02:46 PM;)
Posted by: Terry Oglesby at April 15, 2005 03:00 PM