Yesterday’s personal news highlight, for me, was that:
…a bunch of computer-generated gibberish masquerading as an academic paper has been accepted at a scientific conference … the World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics
as reported by CNN. This relates to me, for two reasons:
My former boss Jürgen Bortolazzi, a prolific author of (good!) research papers, used to joke that it wasn’t really him who wrote those papers but that he had developed a Prolog-based paper generator. It’s great to see that somebody actually developed such a thing, and it works!
But closer to home, I know that conference! I had a paper there, a few years back, in fact even an invited paper! So I decided to travel to Florida and give a talk on it. And having done so, I remember very well that I turned around to my wife, who came with me for a brief vacation afterwards, saying: "what a waste of time" … maybe this was just the first known computer-generated paper at that conference.
I was laughing so hard yesterday, it simply had to happen, and it had to happen to that conference.