They created a computer program to randomly generate academic papers composed of conpletely impenetrable gibberish, utter jabbering Roundhead madness, & then submitted some of them to be presented at a conference.
One of the papers was accepted. 
http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/science/04/14/mit.prank.reut/index.html
I worship the ground they walk on.
Woo-hoo! If these guys got togther with those Latino kids who won the robot submarine contest, they could rule the earth.
Perhaps they’re already here…
It would explain some of the posts I’ve seen.
Check out Great Debates.
If these guys ever posted here, I think I know what handle they used.
Well, it isn’t quite the Sokal hoax, is it? The paper hadn’t passed peer review! And it wasn’t published; a lot of conference papers are drafts before publication.
Which in not to say that they aren’t brilliant—I’m sure they’re a few orders of magnitude smarter than me; however the news article did overstate the scope of their accomplishment. After all, Sokal has had an academic paper generating program on his site for some time now.
My thoughts exactly
From talking with my Comp Sci grad student friend, the conference their paper got accepted at is a pretty scummy one that spams all comp sci people. So getting accepted is kind of like getting into Who’s Who in America High School Students–basically arbitrary and done to add psuedo legimacy and get people to show up. Which disappoints me since it would be cool if it got into a “real” conference but I guess my faith in academic standards is restored somewhat.
I miss that guy.
It just goes to show The Straight Dope is way ahead of these MIT jokers. I propose that Autohink apply for a teaching job. If it gets an interview, those MIT guys are pwned.
Humph. I started a thread on this, and no one even opened it. :mad:
Check out the stats on the conference here
Last year there were 2900 papers (yes, that’s four digits) for 900 attendees.
Also, check out the correspondence on the rejected paper. The conference chair would not give reviewer comments. I think this conference is randomly generated, if you ask me. They probably haven’t gotten around to generating reviewer comments yet.
The sponsoring organizations are fun too, including
Slovenian Artificial Intelligence Society (Slovenia)
Cybernetics and Human Knowing: A Journal of Second Order Cybernetics and Cybersemiotics (Denmark)
and that source of future Nobel Laureates
The Tunisian Scientific Society (Tunisia)
I am pretty sure I’ve gotten spam asking me to submit to this thing.
:eek:
I think they invented my Romantics professor, too!
What I really want to know is why the second paper got rejected.
Any quarter-way competent reviewer would have seen something was wrong with the paper in the first two paragraphs. The papers were cute, but not convincing. Though I have reviewed some papers from Russia almost as bad as these…