[ExI] randomly generated math paper accepted for publication

[Giulio Prisco]

This is super cool! I have seen other examples of randomly generated
crap published in "respectable" journals, I think one example had a
certain notoriety a few years ago.

Once in an AI lab we played with one of these automatic article
generators, able to put together something that looks vaguely
plausible at a first glance, using other writings of the same authors
and a knowledge base. We thought of sending a particularly good
example to a journal, I guess it would have been accepted.

Does that mean that referees don't even read the papers that they
should review? No, because there are two cases where they do read them
very carefully: 1) when the paper is from a competitor whose prestige
they want to destroy, 2) when they want to publish similar results
first. We should never forget that scientists are people like everyone
else.

It does mean the the traditional peer-review process, with its
ridiculous delays of months and even years, is broken beyond repair.

On Sat, Oct 20, 2012 at 7:24 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
>
>
> Not only is this hilarious, it makes me feel so much better:
>
>
>
> Mathgen paper accepted!
>
> Posted on September 14, 2012
>
> I’m pleased to announce that Mathgen has had its first randomly-generated
> paper accepted by a  journal!
>
> ________________________________
>
> On August 3, 2012, a certain Professor Marcie Rathke of the University of
> Southern North Dakota at Hoople submitted a very interesting article to
> Advances in Pure Mathematics, one of the many fine journals put out by
> Scientific Research Publishing. (Your inbox and/or spam trap very likely
> contains useful information about their publications at this very moment!)
> This mathematical tour de force was entitled “Independent, Negative,
> Canonically Turing Arrows of Equations and Problems in Applied Formal
> PDE”,
> and I quote here its intriguing abstract:
>
> Let ρ=A. Is it possible to extend isomorphisms? We show that D′ is
> stochastically orthogonal and trivially affine. In [10], the main result
> was
> the construction of p-Cardano, compactly Erdős, Weyl functions. This could
> shed important light on a conjecture of Conway-d’Alembert.
>
>
>
>
>
> http://thatsmathematics.com/blog/archives/102
>
>
>
>
>
> Here’s the paper:
>
>
>
>
> http://thatsmathematics.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/mathgen-1389529747.pdf
>
>
>
>
>
> So why does it make me feel better?  On occasion I have struggled through
> some of the papers, or unsuccessfully attempted to comprehend, some of the
> material in the more arcane publications in mathematical theory, but have
> always come away dismayed and discouraged.  It feels like a hundred
> lifetimes would be insufficient to understand the material there.  It
> makes
> me feel dumber than a box or rocks.
>
>
>
> Now I know that even referees can be snowed by this, I realize that this
> practice could go undetected: a real human writes a reasonable abstract
> and
> the first page or two (which is usually about my endurance level in trying
> to comprehend the papers) then let MathSpew fill out the paper, which is
> then published in an attempt to not perish.
>
>
>
> In reality, the joke is on anyone who attempts to publish in this journal,
> paying the 500 dollar fee.  If you look at the referee’s comments, it is
> not
> at all clear to me those were generated by an actual human either.
>
>
>
> spike
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>