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Scientists Fooled Again
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 (MIT). Jeremy
Stribling said 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, 2005 in Orlando, Florida.
One of the papers -- "Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of
Access Points and Redundancy" -- was accepted for presentation.
The prank recalled a 1996 hoax in which New York University physicist Alan Sokal
succeeded in getting an entire paper with a mix of truths, falsehoods, non
sequiturs and otherwise meaningless mumbo-jumbo published in the journal Social
Text.
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.
"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."
Stribling said conference organizers had not yet formally rescinded their
invitation to present the paper.
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