Thursday, April 14, 2005
ROOTER
Three MIT grad students have pulled off a prank that recalls Alan Sokal’s celebrated Social Text hoaxing:
Jeremy Stribling said that he and two fellow MIT graduate students questioned the standards of some academic conferences, so they wrote a computer program to generate research papers complete with nonsensical text, charts and diagrams.
To their surprise, one of the papers - “Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy” - was accepted for presentation.
“Rooter" features such mind-bending gems as: “the model for our heuristic consists of four independent components: simulated annealing, active networks, flexible modalities, and the study of reinforcement learning” and “We implemented our scatter/gather I/O server in Simula-67, augmented with opportunistically pipelined extensions”.
I want a scatter/gather server.