Academic News
MIT Pranksters Fob Computer Gibberish on Tech Conference
Pranksters at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology successfully submitted a research paper written entirely by computer to scientific conference, according to the Reuters news agency. Jeremy Stribling told Reuters last week that he and two fellow MIT graduate students, in questioning the standards of some academic conferences, wrote a computer program to generate research papers complete with "context-free grammar," charts and diagrams.
The trio submitted two of the randomly assembled papers to the World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics, scheduled to be held July 10-13 in Orlando, Fla. To their surprise, one of the papers--
"Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy"--was accepted for presentation. The Rooter paper contains such verbiage 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."
It seems to me that I've been seeing a lot of "context-free" grammar, and grammar-free prose lately, in sources that shall here remain unnamed.
Pranksters at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology successfully submitted a research paper written entirely by computer to scientific conference, according to the Reuters news agency. Jeremy Stribling told Reuters last week that he and two fellow MIT graduate students, in questioning the standards of some academic conferences, wrote a computer program to generate research papers complete with "context-free grammar," charts and diagrams.
The trio submitted two of the randomly assembled papers to the World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics, scheduled to be held July 10-13 in Orlando, Fla. To their surprise, one of the papers--
"Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy"--was accepted for presentation. The Rooter paper contains such verbiage 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."
It seems to me that I've been seeing a lot of "context-free" grammar, and grammar-free prose lately, in sources that shall here remain unnamed.
posted by Papa, aka Don at 3:09 PM
2 Comments:
I've been wondering whether this issue (I was actually thinking of the practice of harvesting papers from the internet) preoccupied you as a professor. Do you take snippets of text from your students' papers and Google them? I've heard that's common.
I don't do that but OU plans to purchase a license for "turnitin.com" software, which does precisely that: compares papers against a vast database to look for plagiarism.
Post a Comment
<< Home