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About

SCIgen is a program that generates random Computer Science researchpapers, including graphs, figures, and citations. It uses ahand-writtencontext-free grammar to form all elements of thepapers. Our aim here is to maximize amusement, rather than coherence.

One useful purpose for such a program is to auto-generate submissionsto conferences that you suspect might have very low submissionstandards. A prime example, which you may recognize from spam in yourinbox, is SCI/IIIS and its dozens of co-located conferences (check outthe very broad conference description on theWMSCI 2005 website). There's also a list ofknown bogus conferences. Using SCIgen to generate submissions forconferences like this gives us pleasure to no end. In fact, one ofour papers was accepted to SCI 2005! SeeExamples for more details.

We went to WMSCI 2005. Check out thetalks andvideo. You can find more details in ourblog.

Also, check out our 10th anniversary celebrationproject:SCIpher!

Generate a Random Paper

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

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

Examples

Here are two papers we submitted toWMSCI 2005:

Rooter: A Methodology for the TypicalUnification of Access Points and Redundancy(PS,PDF)
Jeremy Stribling, Daniel Aguayo and MaxwellKrohn

This paper was accepted as a "non-reviewed" paper!
- Acceptance e-mail
- A strangefollow-up email, along with ourresponse
- Anthony Liekens sent aninquiry to WMSCI about this situation, and receivedthis response,with an amazing letter (PS,PDF) attached. (Also check out Jeff Erickson'sin-depth deconstruction of this letter.)
- With the many generousdonations we received, wepaid one conferenceregistration fee of $390.
- Our registration fee wasrefunded. Seeabove for the next phase of our plan.
We received manydonations to send us to theconference, 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 wasrejected. Weasked for reviews, and gotthis response.

Talks

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

Harnessing Byzantine Fault Tolerance Using Classical Theory
Dr. Thaddeus Westerson, Institute for Human Understanding (Max)
Synthesizing Checksums and Lambda Calculus usingJog
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 theresulting movie, titledNear 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)

You can read more about the triphere, and check outsome pictureshere.

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

Code

The code for SCIgen is released under GPL, and is now availablevia 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/cvsCVS 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'swhat you need on your computer to run it (we've run it on FreeBSD andGNU/Linux platforms):

If you would like to contribute code to this project (i.e., byhelping us expand our context-free grammar with more sentences, nouns,etc.), pleasecontact us with any patches andwe'll apply them if they seem reasonable. We hope to set up a bettersystem sometime in the near future.

Running the code. We've been getting a lot of questions abouthow to run the code. There are quite a few misleading files in thesource -- sorry about that. All you need to do to generate a paper isto runmake-latex.pl (also look atmake-latex.pl--help). You can also usescigen.pl to generateany arbitrary starting target. Seescirules.in for mostof the grammar rules.

Donations

As indicatedabove, one of our generatedpapers got accepted to WMSCI 2005. Our plan was to go thereand give acompletely randomly-generated talk, deliveredentirely with a straight face. However, this is veryexpensivefor grad students such as ourselves. So, we asked visitors to thissite to make small donations toward this dream of ours; the responsewas overwhelming.

Amount of donations:$2401.43
Number of donations:165
Amount of time:72 hours

We used this money tohold our own session at thesame hotel as WMSCI 2005.