Thursday, March 12, 2009

Tired of writing those research papers?

Here's an old story that I was thinking of the other day and decided to dust off.

A few years ago, three MIT graduate students decided to write a program that randomly writes computer science papers using context free grammar, which means it produces (somewhat) readable papers. They then submitted the paper to a conference, where it was accepted. The joke was eventually discovered, and the paper rejected, but they went anyway and gave a randomly generated presentation at the same hotel as the conference.

The program is available here, along with their papers and presentations. Notice that it also produces graphs and plenty of citations, some of them with your name in them. Thus, you can kill two birds with one stone: get that paper done you've been meaning to finish, and shamelessly self-promote your other "work".

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