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Randomly Generated Paper Accepted to Conference
mldqj writes "Some students at MIT wrote a program called SCIgen - An Automatic CS Paper Generator. From their website: SCIgen is a program that generates random Computer Science research papers, including graphs, figures, and citations. What's amazing is that one of their randomly generated paper was accepted to WMSCI 2005. Now they are accepting donation to fund their trip to the conference and give a randomly generated talk."
At the larger conferences they make some attempt at screening out the known crackpots. The amount of effort varies.
So, this doesn't come close to the sucess of Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity which got into a peer reviewed journal.
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
It gets worse... they submitted another paper that was rejected, they asked why, and got this in reply (several paragraphs, complete with random statistics, to say "it's too much work for us to tell you.")
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
These junk conferences are organized for no reason other than profit. Accepting everything that is submitted is consistent with their objective.
The deal is, in an effort to get tenure or grants in a publish-or-perish world, mediocre researchers submit to these things. They are published if and only if they pay the registration fee. For this particular conference, the fee is a mere $US 390.
And there are no quantity discounts. If you have n papers you pay n times the fee.
For one thing, if you visit the site, the paper that got accepted was accepted as a "non-reviewed" paper.
Even so, before you go off the deep end on this, in my field (which is EE, not CS) it is generally accepted that the conferences are for preliminary results, and the journals are for final results. As a result, conference submissions tend to receive cursory reviews, and journal submissions receive highly rigorous reviews.
At many (but not all) conferences, authors tend to be given the benefit of the doubt, so long as the paper is not obviously ridiculous or plagiarized.
I attended a recent conference at a major university where, rumor had it, 200 papers were accepted and only four were rejected. In spite of this, I found the quality of the conference quite high. You have to go into such things realizing that some crap is going to get through the filter. However, it's nice to hear what everyone is working on, even if the ideas are not completely finished and some of the work might not be going anywhere.
You give the author the benefit of the doubt in a conference submission. The time to be rigorous is at the point of submission to a journal, and in my field, acceptance to a journal is normally crucial to having an idea accepted by the entire community.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Actually, I doubt that the graduate students presenting this talk would care to work with anybody that is actually attending SCI! I think people missed the fact that this is to point out the fallacy of for-profit conferences like SCI.
These "random" elements which John Cage used in much of his music are a far cry from the "randomness" that would be generated from a computer program using algorithms to calculate random instances of pitch, duration, tempo, velocity, etc.
The latter would probably end up looking and sounding, ironically, nearly identical to music composed using serialism, set theory, 12-tone music, etc. in which all 12 notes of the chromatic scale are arranged into a "row", which can then be used in retrograde, inversion, rotation, transposition, among others, all at the compsoer's discretion. The music of Schoenberg, Webern, Berg, and other serialists tend to be more respected among mathematicians these days.
John Cage's "randomness" stems from his intense studies of Eastern Religions, especially Zen Buddhism. For a large portion of his life, much of his music was derived, at least in part, from quasi-random decisions determined in the I Ching (The Chinese Book of Changes). Much has been written by and about John Cage on using random (aleatoric, as we musicians refer to it) elements, and of his philosophies on music in general
To give you an example of his aleatoric compositions:
4'33 - in 3 movements, the performer is instructed to sit silently at the keyboard for 4 minutes and 33 seconds, closing and opening the lid between each movement. the interpretations are too many to list here.
Imaginary Landscape No.4 - the score calls for the prescribed manipulations of knobs on 12 radios. The aural result is dependent on what happens to be on the airwaves at the instant of performance.
Other works have been "composed" by filling in notes, articulations, etc. wherever tiny imperfections appear on a sheet of manuscript paper.