Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Random paper generators

In what started as a joke, some people at MIT put together a "random abstract generator". It's a tool that will generate a random Computer Science abstract. The funny part is that the papers, though grammatically correct, just really don't make a ton of sense. For example, I just generated this one:

Evaluating Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games Using Amphibious Theory
Abstract
Knowledge-based communication and RPCs have garnered great interest from both scholars and cyberinformaticians in the last several years. After years of technical research into sensor networks, we prove the investigation of flip-flop gates. Our focus here is not on whether model checking can be made amphibious, embedded, and robust, but rather on proposing new symbiotic modalities (Soder).

It's giving me a headache to try to interpret all that.

Basically, there are some conferences that will basically accept anyone's paper, regardless of if it makes sense or not.  So, using this random program generator, the authors of this tool were actually accepted to present at conferences, even if what the abstract said was complete gibberish.

Edit: Here's the link to the generator: pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/

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