Originally published May 2 2005
MIT pranksters get paper full of gibberish accepted for review at scientific conference
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
A scientific conference recently accepted a paper from MIT students who used a computer program to spew out a paper filled with complete nonsense. The program used context-free grammar and useless charts to construct bogus papers, which three MIT students mailed out to several conferences. The World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI) actually accepted the paper as genuine. The students created the program in order to show that many conferences have questionable review and acceptance criteria and often only accept papers so that people will pay the conference for the chance to present their work. The point was certainly proven.
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.
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."
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."
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