Fake Scientific Paper Detector

moon_monkey writes "Ever wondered whether a scientific paper was actually written by a robot? A new program developed by researchers at Indiana University promises to tell you one way or the other. It was actually developed in response to a prank by MIT researchers who generated a paper from random bits of text and got it accepted for a conference."

Comments

Turing test?

[Nesetril]

so can a robot write a paper and then decide whether the paper was written by a robot (itself)?

Duh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Light on details but I assume that to create this thing a bunch of known-real and known-fake papers were analzyed and they just found patterns that were indicative of a fake. They wouldn't even have to understand why...just dump a bunch of statistics and choose the ones more associated with the fake pile. Just like reverse-engineering spam filters, it could be circumvented by discovering whatever the "real" properties are and focusing on them.

Re:Self defeating?

[BraksDad]

Maybe after a string of anti robot robots, MIT would come up with a robot that would generate a real scientific paper!

next comes your anti robot robot
then the anti anti robot robot robot
and of course the anti anti anti robot robot robot robot
and the anti anti anti anti robot robot robot robot robot
...
I could go on since cut and paste is so easy ;-)

Perhaps it would be a million anti's followed by a million and one robots before something useful came out of such an exercise, but wouldn't it be cool to witness?