The Associated Press is reporting today that three MIT graduate students recently pulled off a hilarious hoax that caught some in the academic community with their intellectual and ethical pants down. (Read the news article here)
The students created a computer program that takes random sentences from actual scholarly papers and randomly places academic buzzwords in place of real words in some of the sentences. The program then adds to the illusion by adding meaningless charts and graphs to the paper. The students used the program to generate two papers which they submitted to various academic conferences for presentation and publication. One of the papers was titled "The Influence of Probabilistic Methodologies on Networking" and the other had the equally baffling title "Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy." The introduction of the "Rooter" paper states: "Many scholars would agree that, had it not been for active networks, the simulation of Lamport clocks might never have occurred." (Now who could argue with that?)
The Ninth Annual World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (whose name sounds like it was generated by the MIT Student's program) rejected the "Probabilistic Methodologies" paper, but accepted the "Rooter" paper for publication and invited it's authors to attend the conference in Orlando in July to present their paper. When word of the hoax got out, conference organizers rescinded the offer to present the paper and refunded the student's $390 conference fee.
The grad students were disappointed. They were planning to come and present a randomly generated speech. With a perfectly straight face.
You might chuckle, but I think these guys are on to something. First of all, this is a great advance in the area of artificial intelligence. As each year goes by, computers are able to do more and more things like humans. Now, thanks to these brilliant MIT students, computers are able to do that most human of endeavors, to come out with what my dad euphemistically called "horse hockey."
Just think of the application for the business world! By employing this program, companies can do away with large numbers of highly paid middle management people. Thanks to this program, computers can now automatically make up junk and put it in useless memos. If you can combine it with a good speech simulator, you could put 10-12 PCs in a room randomly saying stupid, inane things and save the expense of paying people to sit through meetings!
And the government! Just think of it! Who needs the Fair Tax when we can save billions by replacing tens of thousands of federal workers with computers randomly generating position papers, memos, talking points for Alan Greenspan, speeches for senators, and environmental impact studies? The entire Department of Education could run on autopilot with no human involvement needed!
And think of the application for the church... OK, I'm not going there.
Yes, these bright young men have built a better mouse trap and the world will beat a path to their door! As long as there is a need for long-winded papers, speeches, sayings and discussions that say and mean absolutely nothing, there will be a need for this program!
Now, what should they call the program? Any suggestions?
Randomly creates horse hockey, huh? They could name it after several PEOPLE that come to mind.
Posted by: Corey | Thursday, April 21, 2005 at 11:17 PM