Ah, conference papers!

Stop me if you've heard this one before. Three MIT graduate students

wrote a computer program to generate research papers complete with "context-free grammar," charts and diagrams.

The trio submitted two of the randomly assembled papers to the World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI), scheduled to be held July 10-13 in Orlando, Florida.

To their surprise, one of the papers -- "Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy" -- was accepted for presentation....

"Rooter" features such mind-bending gems as: "the model for our heuristic consists of four independent components: simulated annealing, active networks, flexible modalities, and the study of reinforcement learning" and "We implemented our scatter/gather I/O server in Simula-67, augmented with opportunistically pipelined extensions."...

Nagib Callaos, a conference organizer, said the paper was one of a small number accepted on a "non-reviewed" basis -- meaning that reviewers had not yet given their feedback by the acceptance deadline.... [but that] "Bogus papers should not be included in the conference program."

I remember a story in Omni Magazine (remember Omni, the Velvet Underground of popular science magazines? and remember how it bore a disturbing typographic and design resemblance to Penthouse?-- which in some subliminal way was probably responsible for a few people choosing careers in science) in which a smart-aleck graduate student who, in order to get back at his advisors and blackmail the entire academic systems, programs a computer to write dissertations at lightning speed. Perhaps this an another example of science fiction anticipating the future....

[To the tune of Sting, "Forget About the Future," from the album "Sacred Love".]