SCIgen

SCIgen is a program that randomly generates nonsense in the form of computer science research papers, including graphs, figures, and citations. It uses a custom-made context-free grammar to form all elements of the papers.

In 2005, a paper generated by SCIgen, "Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy", was accepted as a "non-reviewed" paper to the 2005 World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics and the authors were invited to speak [cite web | url = http://thepeerreview.ca/view.php?aid=221 | title = The Dangers of Spamferences | format = HTML | author = Rob Thomas] . The authors of SCIgen described their hoax on their website, and it soon received great publicity when picked up by Slashdot.WMSCI withdrew their invitation, but the SCIgen team went anyway, renting space in the hotel separately from the conference and delivering a series of randomly generated talks on their own "track." The organizer of all these conferences is Professor Nagib Callaos. The WMSCI was also sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers from 2000 until 2005. The IEEE stopped granting sponsorship to Callaos in 2006.

Submitting the paper was a deliberate attempt to embarrass WMSCI, which the authors claim accepts low-quality papers and sends unsolicited requests for submissions in bulk to academics. As the SCIgen website states:quotation
One useful purpose for such a program is to auto-generate submissions to conferences that you suspect might have very low submission standards. A prime example, which you may recognize from spam in your inbox, is SCI/IIIS and its dozens of co-located conferences (check out the very broad conference description on the WMSCI 2005 website).
About SCIgen [cite web | url = http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/ | title = SCIgen - An Automatic CS Paper Generator | publisher = MIT ]

Sample output

Opening abstract of "Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy":cite web
url = http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/rooter.pdf
title = Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy
author = Stribling, Jeremy
coauthors = Aguayo, Daniel; Krohn, Maxwell
format = PDF
quote = Many physicists would agree that, had it not been for congestion control, the evaluation of web browsers might never have occurred. In fact, few hackers worldwide would disagree with the essential unification of voice-over-IP and public/private key pair. In order to solve this riddle, we confirm that SMPs can be made stochastic, cacheable, and interposable.] quotation
Many physicists would agree that, had it not been for congestion control, the evaluation of web browsers might never have occurred. In fact, few hackers worldwide would disagree with the essential unification of voice-over-IP and public/private key pair. In order to solve this riddle, we confirm that SMPs can be made stochastic, cacheable, and interposable.

Other successful works

* The "Rooter" paper, after machine translation into Russian, has been accepted into a Russian scientific journal. The only drawback the reviewer has noted was “unsatisfactory style” [(in Russian) cite web | url = http://www.scientific.ru/trv/2008/013/ostap_bender.html | title = Четыреста первый способ Остапа Бендера] [(in Russian) cite web | url = http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fjurnal.org%2Farticles%2F2008%2Fart.php%3Fart%3Dradio14.htm | title = Корчеватель: алгоритм типичной унификации точек доступа и избыточности (Google cache)] .
* Mathias Ulsar's paper was accepted to the IPSI-BG conference [cite web | url = http://www.mwise.de/blog/index.php/2005/12/29/scigen-for-scientific-research-a-case-study/ | title = Mathias Ulsar's paper. ] .
* Professor Genco Gülan published a paper in the 3rd International Symposium of Interactive Media Design [cite web | url = http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/blog/index.php?entry=entry060414-130910 | title = About Genco Gulan's paper. ] .
* Students at Iran's Sharif University of Technology published a paper in the Journal of Applied Mathematics and Computation (which is published by Elsevier) [cite web | url = http://ce.sharif.edu/~ghodsi/soft-group/misc/AMC-paper.pdf | title = Cooperative, Compact Algorithms for Randomized Algorithms | format = PDF | author = Rohollah Mosallahnezhad ] . The students wrote under the false, non-Persian surname, MosallahNejad, which translates literally as: "from an Armed Breed". The paper was subsequently removed when the publishers were informed that it was a joke paper [cite web | url = http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.amc.2007.03.011 | title = REMOVED: Cooperative, compact algorithms for randomized algorithms | author = John L. Casti ] .

See also

* Sokal affair
* Turing test

References