MIT students pull prank on conference
Date: Sunday, April 17, 2005 @ 16:54:43 UTC
Topic: Testimonials


From CNN.com: Computer-generated gibberish submitted, accepted

Thursday, April 14, 2005 Posted: 7:29 PM EDT (2329 GMT)

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts (Reuters) -- In a victory for pranksters at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a bunch of computer-generated gibberish masquerading as an academic paper has been accepted at a scientific conference.

Jeremy Stribling said Thursday 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 "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 (WMSCI), scheduled to be held July 10-13 in Orlando, Florida.

To their surprise, one of the papers -- "Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy" -- was accepted for presentation.

Source story: http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/science/04/14/mit.prank.reut/





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