Should I laugh or cry?

Three US boffins built a programme designed to create research papers with random text, charts and diagrams.

Two bogus papers were submitted to a computing conference in Florida, and one of them was accepted.

I really can’t believe this. What a sad state of affairs we find ourselves in when such obvious gibberish can be accepted by anyone with half a brain, let alone someone vetting papers for a computer conference.

On the one hand it is an impressive feat to create a program to generate this garbage, and on the other a sad indictment of our industry that it could be accepted as anything but a sham.

You can read more about this along with the full paper at: Prank fools US science conference

This reminded me of the excellent “Primate Programming Inc” web site. May be they should be presenting at this conference as well. 🙂