Closer to artificial intelligence? or just more reason to be doubtful of our own?

A while ago I posted this on a self-writing, pro-war blog.  Now, a paper written by a “context-free grammar” program has been accepted by the World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics.

“To their surprise, one of the papers — ‘Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy’ — was accepted for presentation.

The prank recalled a 1996 hoax in which New York University physicist Alan Sokal succeeded in getting an entire paper with a mix of truths, falsehoods, non sequiturs and otherwise meaningless mumbo-jumbo published in the quarterly journal Social Text, published by Duke University Press.

. . .

‘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.’

Stribling said the trio targeted WMSCI because it is notorious within the field of computer science for sending copious e-mails that solicit admissions to the conference.”