SCIgen – An Automatic CS Paper Generator
An Automatic CS Paper Generator


SCIgen - An Automatic CS Paper Generator







About


SCIgen is a program that generates random Computer Science research
papers, including graphs, figures, and citations.  It uses a
hand-written context-free grammar to form all elements of the
papers.  Our aim here is to maximize amusement, rather than coherence.


One useful purpose for such a program is to auto-generate submissions
to conferences that you suspect might have very low submission
standards.  A prime example, which you may recognize from spam in your
inbox, is SCI/IIIS and its dozens of co-located conferences (check out
the very broad conference description on the WMSCI 2005 website).  There's 
also a list of 

known bogus conferences.  Using SCIgen to generate submissions for
conferences like this gives us pleasure to no end.  In fact, one of
our papers was accepted to SCI 2005!  See Examples for more details.


We went to WMSCI 2005.  Check out the talks and
video.  You can find more details in our blog.


Also, check out our 10th anniversary celebration
project: SCIpher!







Generate a Random Paper



Want to generate a random CS paper of your own?  Type in some optional
author names below, and click "Generate".





SCIgen currently supports Latin-1 characters, but not the full Unicode
character set.







Examples

Here are two papers we submitted to 
WMSCI 2005:


Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical
Unification of Access Points and Redundancy
(PS, PDF)
 




This paper was accepted as a "non-reviewed" 
paper!
Acceptance e-mail
A strange follow-up email, along with 
our response
Anthony Liekens sent an 
inquiry to WMSCI about this situation, 
and received this response,
with an amazing letter (PS, 
PDF) attached.  (Also check out 
Jeff Erickson's 

in-depth deconstruction of this letter.)
 With the many generous donations we received, 
we paid one conference 
registration fee of $390.
Our registration fee was refunded.  
See above for the next phase of our plan.



We received many donations to send us to the
conference, so that we can give a randomly-generated talk.


The Influence of Probabilistic Methodologies on 
Networking 
(PS, PDF)

Thomer M. Gil


For some reason, this paper was rejected.  We asked for reviews, and got 
this response.









Talks



Thanks to the generous donations of 165 people, we went to WMSCI 2005
in Orlando and held our own "technical" session in the same hotel.
The (randomly-generated) title of the session was The 6th Annual North American Symposium on
Methodologies, Theory, and Information.  The session included
three randomly-generated talks:


Harnessing Byzantine Fault Tolerance Using Classical Theory
Dr. Thaddeus Westerson, Institute for Human Understanding (Max)

Synthesizing Checksums and Lambda Calculus using Jog
Dr. Mark Zarqawi, American Freedom University (Jeremy)

On the Study of the Ethernet
Franz T. Shenkrishnan, PhD, Network Analysis Laboratories (Dan)




As promised, we videotaped the whole thing.  You can download the
resulting movie, titled Near Science, below.  Movie length: 13:15.



 High quality (AVI: 88 MB, RealMedia: 65 MB): 
Download AVI 
| Download RM
Bit Torrent AVI

AVI Mirrors: 
MIT (MA) 

| CMU (PA)
| Brown (RI)
RM Mirrors: 
MIT (MA) 

| CMU (PA)
| Brown (RI)

 Medium quality (AVI: 48 MB, RealMedia: 42MB): 
Download AVI
| Download RM
Bit Torrent AVI
Coral cache AVI
| Coral cache RM
AVI Mirrors: 
MIT (MA) 

| CMU (PA)
| Brown (RI)
RM Mirrors: 
MIT (MA) 

| CMU (PA)
| Brown (RI)

 Low quality (AVI: 20 MB, RealMedia: 9 MB): 
Download AVI
| Download RM
Bit Torrent AVI
Coral cache AVI
| Coral cache RM
AVI Mirrors: 
MIT (MA)

| CMU (PA)
| Brown (RI)
RM Mirrors: 
MIT (MA)

| CMU (PA)
| Brown (RI)




Trouble playing the AVI?  Try downloading a
DivX codec for Windows
or Mac, or try the open source
VideoLAN player.


You can read more about the trip here, and check out
some pictures 

here.


Many thanks to everyone who made this possible, especially 
Tadd Torborg and family, 
Open Clipart, the 
PDOS research group, and of course 
all the SCIgen donors.







Code


The code for SCIgen is released under GPL, and is now available
via github!

https://github.com/strib/scigen

If you are a time-traveler from 2002 and prefer anonymous CVS, here you go:


% cvs -d :pserver:anoncvs@scigen.csail.mit.edu:/var/cvs login 
Logging in to :pserver:anoncvs@scigen.csail.mit.edu:2401/var/cvs
CVS password: _press return_
% cvs -d :pserver:anoncvs@scigen.csail.mit.edu:/var/cvs co -P scigen




We're still working on documentation and making it more user-friendly,
but you should be able to figure most of it out from the code.  Here's
what you need on your computer to run it (we've run it on FreeBSD and
GNU/Linux platforms):


Perl
LaTeX/BibTeX
Gnuplot
GraphViz



If you would like to contribute code to this project (i.e., by
helping us expand our context-free grammar with more sentences, nouns,
etc.), please contact us with any patches and
we'll apply them if they seem reasonable.  We hope to set up a better
system sometime in the near future.


Running the code. We've been getting a lot of questions about
how to run the code.  There are quite a few misleading files in the
source -- sorry about that.  All you need to do to generate a paper is
to run make-latex.pl (also look at make-latex.pl
--help).  You can also use scigen.pl to generate
any arbitrary starting target.  See scirules.in for most
of the grammar rules.







Donations



As indicated above, one of our generated
papers got accepted to WMSCI 2005.  Our plan was to go there
and give a completely randomly-generated talk, delivered
entirely with a straight face.  However, this is very expensive
for grad students such as ourselves.  So, we asked visitors to this
site to make small donations toward this dream of ours; the response
was overwhelming.


Amount of donations: $2401.43
(after PayPal fees)
Number of donations: 165
Amount of time: 72 hours



We used this money to hold our own session at the
same hotel as WMSCI 2005.







Related Work



Other papers:

Another fantastic 
submission to SCI 2005, by David Mazi�res and Eddie Kohler
Alan Sokal's 
brilliant hoax article (i.e., the Social Text Affair)
Researchers in 
Vienna take down the VIDEA conference

Justin Zobel raises some questions about the validity of SCI 





Other generators:

gzzt.org's list of the best online generators
The Dada Engine, another tool 
that generates random text from context-free grammars
List of text generators from elsewhere.org (on the right)

Barath Raghavan's Systems Topic Generator
An essay generator
SBIR grant proposal generator

We initially based SCIgen on Chris Coyne's grammar for high school papers;
Chris is now making neat pictures with context-free grammars.


Other SCIgen successes:

Philip Davis got a paper accepted to the Open Information Science Journal.
Peter Trifonov got a random paper accepted to the GESTS journal.
Mikhail Gelfand and the Troitsky Variant newspaper published Rooter in Russian in a nationally accredited Russian scientific journal.
"Herbert Schlangemann" got a SCIgen paper accepted to the IEEE CSSE 2008 conference.
Students at Sharif University in Iran got a paper accepted by the Journal of Applied Mathematics and Computation.

Mathias Ulsar got a paper accepted to the IPSI-BG conference.

Professor Genco G�lan published a paper in the 3rd International Symposium 
of Interactive Media Design.









Jeffrey Hargrave



