Tuesday, July 5, 2005, 06:12 PM
At some point during all the press craziness, Science magazine asked us for a picture of us for a SCIgen story they wanted to do. We asked our good friend Frank Dabek to take a few of us. Here's one we took in front of the Department of Systemics, Cybernetics, and Informatics at MIT's CSAIL laboratory.
;)
Left to right: Dan Aguayo, Max Krohn, Jeremy Stribling. Photo credit: Frank Dabek. Sign credit: Sanjit Biswas.
Oh, and here's the picture they eventually used in Science:
;)
Left to right: Dan Aguayo, Jeremy Stribling, Max Krohn. Photo credit: Frank Dabek.
--Jeremy
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Tuesday, July 5, 2005, 06:02 PM
In late March 2005, we were informed by Nagib Callaos Himself that our Rooter paper had been accepted as a "non-reviewed paper" to WMSCI 2005. The best part about this acceptance email was the fact that it was caught by the gmail spam filter -- it wasn't until several days later that we discovered it. When even the acceptance notification to your spamference is considered spam, you know you're doing something wrong.
So the impossible had come to pass. Even though it was clear from the acceptance email that no one had read the paper (i.e., it hadn't actually fooled anyone), it looked enough like a paper that they had accepted it by default. This is more than can be said for the Mazières and Kohler paper, which to our knowledge was never officially accepted or rejected from WMSCI. Obviously, we were ecstatic; but now, what was the next step? Did we dare carry this project all the way to its logical extreme: presenting the paper with a randomly-generated talk at WMSCI?
The answer, clearly, was an emphatic yes.
But the conference was in Florida, and we were simple grad students way up in Boston: how could we afford to make the trip? Moreover, the conference wanted $390 to publish the paper and attend the conference. It would be pretty difficult to convince our usual source of conference travel money (our advisor's research grants) to pay our way. So we turned to the one thing we trusted to provide us with wisdom, guidance, and kindness: the Internet.
Using his HTML non-skillz, Jeremy set up a simple website with the WMSCI story, the SCIgen software, and a PayPal donation button. This might have been interesting enough to attract a little attention, but it was missing something . . . So, despite all of his numerous social obligations, Jeremy spent a day or two wrapping a web interface around the SCIgen software, allowing anyone to create their own papers with a click of a button. Then on the evening of April 11, 2005, fingers crossed, he sent five or six emails to friends and colleagues, hoping for a few donations over the coming months to help fray the costs of the WMSCI trip.
From these humble beginnings: Metafilter! Fark! Slashdot! BoingBoing! Boston Herald! Front page of CNN! Front page of BBC! $2400 in three days!
Incredible place, that Internet. Before we knew what hit us, our servers were melting, our inboxes were full, and our PayPal account was overflowing. The reaction was very supportive, and everyone loved the idea of heading down to Florida to give a talk. We're still blown away by all the attention.
Of course, fame is a double-edged sword, laced with trace amounts of irony. Reporters began trying to hound Nagib Callaos for quotes; Internet citizens started flame-emailing him; surely the WMSCI servers saw quite an unusual spike in traffic that week. When we finally had enough money to register for the conference, we did so; but by then it was too late. Nagib refunded our money, and told us we were no longer welcome at his spamference.
This saddened us deeply and profoundly. The sense of loss was palpable. Had we destroyed our chance at giving a fake talk by coming public too soon? Gerald Sussman, venerable MIT professor and noted prank connoisseur, publicly berated Jeremy in his office for exposing the "hack" prematurely. To paraphrase Sussman: "You needed money? You should have just asked me! I could have gotten together three professors to pay your way, no problem!" And he threw his hands up and stormed out. Damn, if only we had thought of asking Gerald Sussman for $1100 . . .
Well, anyway, the cat was out of the bag, and there was nothing we could do but soldier onward. We were more determined than ever to go to the conference and give a randomly-generated talk. But that was off in July, and there was still much work to be done.
--Jeremy
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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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