This post is courtesy of Anne Taylor-Vaisey: Random is a word that seems to be used well, randomly these days by the twenty-somethings I know, and it can refer to just about anything. Well, if you want to witness the true meaning of the word, check out the SCIgen site.
The program allows you to generate a computer science research paper fit for presentation at a scientific meeting! You can choose from a variety of “subjects” and even produce an impressive PDF. Check out the references that include your name. The article titles and journals are hilarious.
This site was produced by graduate students at MIT and it includes this paper, produced using SCIgen and accepted for presentation at a scientific conference:
Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy
Here is a description of SCIgen, from the Web site:
SCIgen is a program that generates random Computer Science research papers, including graphs, figures, and citations. It uses a hand-written context-free grammar to form all elements of the papers. Our aim here is to maximize amusement, rather than coherence.
One useful purpose for such a program is to auto-generate submissions to conferences that you suspect might have very low submission standards. A prime example, which you may recognize from spam in your inbox, is SCI/IIIS and its dozens of co-located conferences (check out the very broad conference description on the WMSCI 2005 website). Using SCIgen to generate submissions for conferences like this gives us pleasure to no end. In fact, one of our papers was accepted to SCI 2005!
