The ninth annual "World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics, and Informatics" (WMSCI -2005) is scheduled to take place this July in Orlando, Florida. According to its web site, the conference focuses on "specific disciplinary research, as well as for multi, inter and trans-disciplinary studies and projects" with an aim of "fostering analogical thinking and, hence, producing input to the logical thinking." One of the academic papers included for presentation is titled "Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy" (pdf doc). The product of three MIT graduate students, "Rooter" is a very difficult read. To the untrained eye, it seems to be a bunch of gibberish. In this case, the untrained eye is in the right, because "Rooter" is a grade A prank.

According to Jeffrey Stribling, one of Rooter's authors, the paper is a computer-generated research paper. It includes graphs, figures, and citations and prints out hand-written context-free grammar to form all elements of the paper. How random and context-free can the report be? Here's a sample from the paper, "the model for our heuristic consists of four independent components: simulated annealing, active networks, flexible modalities, and the study of reinforcement learning." Stribling said the trio was inspired to contribute the paper to WMSCI because they have a thing about academic conferences which only seem to exist to make money for organizers. Stribling said that WMSCI is one such example, a conference which spams the academic world looking for contributions.

MIT students pull prank on conference