Slashdot Log In
Randomly Generated Paper Accepted to Conference
Posted by
timothy
on Wed Apr 13, 2005 01:00 PM
from the swi-jljkd8623hds-s89s-da-s dept.
from the swi-jljkd8623hds-s89s-da-s dept.
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."
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Patents application (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Patents application (Score:5, Funny)
I thought it would be rather interesting to create a program the randomly creates musical works. In fact, I would like it to create millions or billions of these works and to submit them for copyright
I think it would be possible to create every possible permutation of a 4 bar, or heck up to 16 bar melody, rhythm and harmony.
Then I could sue any new release by any record company 8D
Parent
Re:Patents application (Score:5, Interesting)
You would need quite a few. Just the combination of the first 8 notes is 26^7=8,031,810,176, assuming the first note's placement is irrelevant, and assuming up to an octave's jump in value either way. That is discounting rythmic variations, which would add quite a few extra combos.
The outcome space for a melody is astoundingly large.
Parent
Overkill. Keep it simple. (Score:5, Funny)
Billions? Why bother? Based on my listening experience, Clearchannel and the record execs seem to have built empires on no more than three variations.
So keep it simple. Who needs the Circle of Fifths, or any of those pesky black piano keys when C-G-D and some random notes/rap over a drum track (serving as the bridge) will do? Repeat "ad naseum"
1) happy, mindless dance tune by teen-star-du-jour. 90beats per minute minimum, bass drum is primary instrument. May require heavy use of DSP processing to keep singer on pitch.
2) Rap about rapper knocking other rappers off the top of the charts and or "crunk whack party", "bustin' caps" or "dubs." Word "bitches" is mandatory. Threatening violence is a plus. Don't forget shout out to imprisoned/dead homies on extended mix version.
3) Wheezy, whiny country & western tune, mandatory mentions include pickup truck, whiskey. Extra chart-topping potential for use of word "fool".
Parent
In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:In other news... (Score:5, Insightful)
no joke. this is not new news.. legislators have been accepting papers without review for years.
Parent
Re:In other news... (Score:5, Interesting)
Or not.
Parent
Re:In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Random slashdot story generator (Score:5, Funny)
Admit it. You would swear you're looking at a real slashdot story
Parent
I'd hate to be a paper referee after this. (Score:5, Interesting)
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. (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:I'd hate to be a paper referee after this. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is true, but even more things are going to sound like bullshit because they are exactly that. Like Carl Sagan said, "They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." Besides, many groundbreaking papers (special relativity comes to mind) are not peer reviewed anyway because there really is no one qualified to review them.
Parent
Re:I'd hate to be a paper referee after this. (Score:5, Insightful)
I strongly disagree. Good writing is good writing, no matter what the subject matter; the most revolutionary discoveries can (and should) be presented in a style that is accessible to readers knowledgeable in the field. On the other hand, buzzword-laden crap is pretty much a sure sign that the author has no meaningful contribution to make; and when buzzword-laden crap is what you get in the majority of papers published, which is pretty much where CS is right now, something is seriously wrong. The fact that randomly generated papers look so much like "real" ones is a sign of a field in serious trouble.
Parent
Re:I'd hate to be a paper referee after this. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you were refereeing a paper and not at least asking that question you would have no business being a referee to begin with.
The paper in question was accepted as "non-reviewed" so obviously the reviewers did not look at it very closely. I would encourage the students to go through with their plan of giving a random talk though. I bet any future employers, postdoc supervisors, etc., who might be there will be thoroughly amused when these students make complete asses out of themselves.
Parent
Re:I'd hate to be a paper referee after this. (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:I'd hate to be a paper referee after this. (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, this kind of scam works on the reluctance of accademics to just say they don't understand something.
Parent
The blind publishing the blind. (Score:5, Insightful)
Excerpt from the submitted paper:
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:
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. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:The blind publishing the blind. (Score:5, Funny)
How else do you expect them to stretch "To make money" out to fill up an entire page?
Parent
Re:The blind publishing the blind. (Score:5, Funny)
"Whores for money."
Later on in the same company (after it went public) each department needed it's own mission statement. I worked in technical support at the time and our director suggested this:
"Answer phone when ring."
None of us now work there.
Parent
Re:The blind publishing the blind. (Score:5, Funny)
Hmmm
Parent
Re:The blind publishing the blind. (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:The blind publishing the blind. (Score:5, Insightful)
Instead, the reviewer cites some statistics and basically writes, "Because I said so".
Parent
Re:The blind publishing the blind. (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:The blind publishing the blind. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re:The blind publishing the blind. (Score:5, Funny)
Seems to work for Dennis Miller.
Parent
Re:The blind publishing the blind. (Score:5, Informative)
Even so, before you go off the deep end on this, in my field (which is EE, not CS) it is generally accepted that the conferences are for preliminary results, and the journals are for final results. As a result, conference submissions tend to receive cursory reviews, and journal submissions receive highly rigorous reviews.
At many (but not all) conferences, authors tend to be given the benefit of the doubt, so long as the paper is not obviously ridiculous or plagiarized.
I attended a recent conference at a major university [jhu.edu] where, rumor had it, 200 papers were accepted and only four were rejected. In spite of this, I found the quality of the conference quite high. You have to go into such things realizing that some crap is going to get through the filter. However, it's nice to hear what everyone is working on, even if the ideas are not completely finished and some of the work might not be going anywhere.
You give the author the benefit of the doubt in a conference submission. The time to be rigorous is at the point of submission to a journal, and in my field, acceptance to a journal is normally crucial to having an idea accepted by the entire community.
Parent
Re:The blind publishing the blind. (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, but did you look at the paper? Figure 6 on "millennium hash tables" (which I admit shows an excellent linear relationship) plots the dependence of "seek time (cylinders)" on "latency (celcius)". Figure 3 measures "time since 1977" in teraflops. Okay--maybe reading the paper is too much to ask, but couldn't they at least have looked at the pictures?
I dare say that the paper is "obviously ridiculous".
Parent
Hmm (Score:5, Funny)
the question is.. (Score:5, Funny)
You're nomenclature is confused. (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:You're nomenclature is confused. (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:the question is.. (Score:5, Funny)
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
Parent
Have a randomly generated comment (Score:5, Funny)
Not surprising at all (Score:5, Informative)
At the larger conferences they make some attempt at screening out the known crackpots. The amount of effort varies.
Re:Not surprising at all (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
No big surprise (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:No big surprise (Score:5, Funny)
I wonder if they'd accept a randomly generated credit card number?
Parent
Don't forget the great paper by Mazieres & Koh (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Don't forget the great paper by Mazieres & (Score:5, Funny)
The paper really needed more graphics.
KFG
Parent
I doubt they'll attend the conference now... (Score:5, Insightful)
It wasn't reviewed (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
Profit Motive (Score:5, Informative)
The deal is, in an effort to get tenure or grants in a publish-or-perish world, mediocre researchers submit to these things. They are published if and only if they pay the registration fee. For this particular conference, the fee is a mere $US 390.
And there are no quantity discounts. If you have n papers you pay n times the fee.
pit this against the essay autograder (Score:5, Funny)
Randomly generated paper accepted (Score:5, Funny)
I hate to admit it, but I fell for it (Score:5, Funny)
By then I forgot all about it being randomly generated. I was trying to read it and I asked myself, "Why the fuck did I open this link, it makes no sense?!" A couple seconds later I remembered.
I urge you to contribute. (Score:5, Funny)
I'm brilliant! (Score:5, Funny)
Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux
To cancel it out, I also wrote one that guarantees -5 Flamebait, too:
Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft