A.J. Brown's Blog » SCIgen http://ajbrown.org/blog Coding adventures and technology musing for the masses Fri, 26 Mar 2010 17:57:50 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 SCIgen is the best thing, ever.http://ajbrown.org/blog/2008/12/26/scigen-is-the-best-thing-ever.html http://ajbrown.org/blog/2008/12/26/scigen-is-the-best-thing-ever.html#comments Fri, 26 Dec 2008 07:25:17 +0000 A.J. Brown http://ajbrown.org/blog/?p=67 I spent Christmas programming. Not because I had to, but because I can't get off the keyboard whenever I have a new Idea. But during my short breaks, I found something to make the stress go away.

There was a recent Slashdot article about a software-generated paper that was accepted at an IEEE conference, with review by humans. The program that generated the paper was SCIgen, written by a couple of MIT Computer Science geniuses. It works completely randomly, all you have to do is enter the name of the authors and click "generate". Not only is the program great for your amusement, but it's actually working -- review commitees are accepting these randomly-generated papers! Genius.

I think these [students? alumni?] deserve some kind of reward, far more than Slashdot links and a few pats on the back. (Might I recommend the "Best Prank on Society Award?) They truly turned a "wouldn't it be cool if..." into something to bring us all amusement :)

Anyway, go play with it. Maybe even see if you can impress your boss and co-workers with your l33t computer science philosophy skills. At the very least, print one out and use it to convince your wife you were actually changing the world, not playing Second Life.

Did I mention I'm addicted to Left 4 Dead?

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