brainstorms

Wednesday April 27, 2005

notes on scigen

sure, mit's scigen is a cute toy, but i am disappointed that it did not enhance/reuse dada engine. not invented there? dada has proven track record; generates pretty good postmodern text as well as other kinds of drivel, and so far as i can tell from the conference scigen had targetted and succeeded, it would have done just fine:

WMSCI 2005 might be perceived as a research corpus callosum, trying to bridge analytically with synthetically oriented efforts, convergent with divergent thinkers and focused specialists with non-focused or multi-focused generalists.

[hmm, that sentence alone may have been generated by dada]

i know scigen was supposed to be a re-enactment of the sokal affair, but there are important differences: sokal was producing a document in a field flooded with years worth of pseudo-scientific gibberish and abstract nonsense. [there are volumes of this stuff; a sharp analysis can be found in sokal and bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science] leaving aside things like open-source license discussions and high-level architecture documents, computing field tends to be a bit more analytical; from what i have looked at, scigen output has no chance against most peer-reviewed journals or respectable conferences like usenix. the output is easy to spot nonsense.

related readings: rob's bimmler prank
rob and bruce ellis's mark V shaney prank
a.c. bulhak, On the simulation of postmodernism and mental debility using recursive transition networks, Monash University Technical report CS 96/264.

While at a conference a few weeks back, I spent an interesting evening with a grain of salt. -- mark v shaney

[image note: gears of an old grain grinder, distillery district, toronto]