Posted on 04/25/2006 3:24:32 PM PDT by FreedomCalls
CUTTING-EDGE artificial intelligence it was not, but a student prank still managed to get the better of some human intelligences last week, when a computer-generated piece of gibberish was accepted as a genuine scientific paper.
Sick of receiving spam emails requesting submissions to the 2005 World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics - which charges $390 for each attendee - students Jeremy Stribling, Daniel Aguayo and Maxwell Krohn of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology wrote a program to generate a nonsense paper.
Starting with skeleton sentences, pools of nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, and a random assortment of computer science jargon, the program produced a grammatically correct yet utterly nonsensical paper titled: "Rooter: a methodology for the typical unification of access points and redundancy". "This isn't artificial intelligence, it's the dirt-simplest way we could think to do this," Stribling says.
The conference organisers say that the paper was sent to human reviewers, who never commented on it, so it ended up being automatically accepted. The conference has now banned the paper. But the pranksters are still planning to give a computer-generated talk at the conference by persuading a human speaker to let them take his or her place.
http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/rooter.pdf
Clickable link:
http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/rooter.pdf
Makes a lot more sense than the crap Mearsheimer and Walt wrote.
More details here:
http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/
It's all very similar to Alan Sokal's hoax paper "Transgressing the Boundaries - Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity." Remember that?
Interesting story but there are a couple of subtlties - this conference doesn't really review the papers so you wouldn't want to condemn peer reviewed or more reputable conferences based on this.
I'm pretty sure this was almost two years ago, unless it happened again this year in which case the people really are stupid.
Big whoop. Ted Kennedy has been talking like this for years.
The "references" are quite amusing.
This article is one year old. Your memory is outstanding.
OH sure, laugh now.
But when Rooter creates light without heat you all will be believers!
I think, for national security reasons, this paper should immediately be classified. Then some friend of Effing can leak it to the Chinese.
I like the title in ref. 6.
Ah, the "Social Text" affair.... that was such a classic!! It should be familiar to everyone, but of course the MSM doesn't like to let people hear too much about the frauds of the left. Physicist Alan Sokal exposed the babbling idiots who edit the pseudo-journal "Social Text" but I don't think they ever suffered any sanction or setbacks in their academic careers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
It has happened before...
This sounds like a job for Sid Caeser.
-PJ
cold-eye-of-reason-is-never-wrong ping
Isn't that how Family Guy is written? At least that's how South Park portrayed it (seals, idea balls, etc.).
That's a blast!
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