Friday, July 1, 2005, 05:24 PM
Welcome to our unbelievably pretentious and self-serving collection of antecdotes about SCIgen. This is not really supposed to be, in the parlance of our times, a "blog"; it's just a place to write down information pertaining to a simple, paper-generating program.
SCIgen was born in February 2005. Jeremy and Max were sitting around in their office at MIT one Sunday afternoon, doing their best to avoid any real work. David Mazières and Eddie Kohler had just submitted their seminal work to WMSCI 2005, a conference known throughout the academic CS community as one that sends out large amounts of spam soliciting submissions. Headed by multi-conference magnate Nagib Callaos, WMSCI sends out numerous emails addressing recipients as "Dr.", and was notorious for refusing to remove you from their lists. Mazières and Kohler's submission was a brilliant tactical response. The gauntlet had been thrown.
Max, inspired by Chris Coyne's now-defunct term paper generator, proposed the idea of an automatic research paper generator. It would be the ideal weapon in the war against 'spamferences' like WMSCI, allowing the instantaneous creation of unlimited paper submissions. Plus, it could be really, really funny.
He set to work modifying the original term paper generator, eventually rewriting it from scratch in Perl. The scripts were surprisingly simple; it soon became clear that the real bottleneck would be writing a gigantic grammar, big enough to generate sufficiently-random and diverse papers at least a few pages long. So, Max and Jeremy toiled away for a few weeks on the grammar, drawing inspiration from a number of real papers, but writing everything by hand.
As the WMSCI 'submission deadline' (it turns out this was extended a number of times) drew closer, Jeremy became insane and started work on random graph and figure generators, giving up all pretense of doing any real research. However, it soon became clear that more help was needed, and as the final hours ticked by, Dan volunteered his not-inconsiderable talent for bullshitting.
After several iterations of generating trial submissions and subsequently fixing bugs and tweaking the grammar, we generated "Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy." It was perfect in every way. We also submitted a second paper, "The Influence of Probabilistic Methodologies on Networking," under the name of our labmate Thomer.
After submitting, we returned to our normal grad student lives. Parting with SCIgen was bittersweet, and everyone was melancholy, but we were stronger people for it. As the weeks went by, and the excitement surrounding the WMSCI submissions faded and was replaced by more pressing and legitimate research concerns, SCIgen sat gathering virtual dust in the humble closet of our CVS repository. We were but mortal men, toiling away in anonymity at our daily lives, inching ever closer to that mythical degree, unaware that soon, Rooter would return.
--Jeremy
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