SCIgen - An Automatic CS Paper Generator

About SCIgen is a program that generates random Computer Science research papers, including graphs, figures, and citations. It uses a hand-written context-free grammar to form all elements of the papers. Our aim here is to maximize amusement, rather than coherence. One useful purpose for such a program is to auto-generate submissions to conferences that you suspect might have very low submission standards. A prime example, which you may recognize from spam in your inbox, is SCI/IIIS and its dozens of co-located conferences (check out the very broad conference description on the WMSCI 2005 website). There's also a list of known bogus conferences. Using SCIgen to generate submissions for conferences like this gives us pleasure to no end. In fact, one of our papers was accepted to SCI 2005! See Examples for more details. We went to WMSCI 2005. Check out the talks and video. You can find more details in our blog. Also, check out our 10th anniversary celebration project: SCIpher!

Generate a Random Paper Want to generate a random CS paper of your own? Type in some optional author names below, and click "Generate". Author 1:

Author 2:

Author 3:

Author 4:

Author 5:

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

Code The code for SCIgen is released under GPL, and is now available via 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/cvs CVS 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's what you need on your computer to run it (we've run it on FreeBSD and GNU/Linux platforms): Perl

LaTeX/BibTeX

Gnuplot

GraphViz If you would like to contribute code to this project (i.e., by helping us expand our context-free grammar with more sentences, nouns, etc.), please contact us with any patches and we'll apply them if they seem reasonable. We hope to set up a better system sometime in the near future. Running the code. We've been getting a lot of questions about how to run the code. There are quite a few misleading files in the source -- sorry about that. All you need to do to generate a paper is to run make-latex.pl (also look at make-latex.pl --help ). You can also use scigen.pl to generate any arbitrary starting target. See scirules.in for most of the grammar rules.

Donations As indicated above, one of our generated papers got accepted to WMSCI 2005. Our plan was to go there and give a completely randomly-generated talk, delivered entirely with a straight face. However, this is very expensive for grad students such as ourselves. So, we asked visitors to this site to make small donations toward this dream of ours; the response was overwhelming. Amount of donations: $2401.43 (after PayPal fees)

Number of donations: 165

Amount of time: 72 hours

We used this money to hold our own session at the same hotel as WMSCI 2005.

Jeffrey Hargrave